09/28 @ 8:00pm - Floating Points: Volume (IV), with David Schafer

Volume (IV) is an improvising quartet featuring electroacoustic harpist Shelley Burgon, turntablist Maria Chavez, laptop artist Stephan Moore and electroacoustic flutist Suzanne Thorpe. Individually these players are singular voices in the New York scene. Together they create an inimitable sonic entity, luminous and enigmatic, without obvious exit or entrance points.

Expansion/Contraption is a four-evening performance/installation, collaboratively conceived by the four members of Volume (IV) (Shelley Burgon, Maria Chavez, Stephan Moore, and Suzanne Thorpe) and visual artists Chris Harvey, David Schafer, Steve Milton, Vince Pan, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter. Through the constant recording and resurfacing of their performances, the members of Volume (IV) negotiate a collective present with around the obstacles and opportunities of the fragmented past. For each performance, the Issue Project Room space is transformed by a different visual artist or team of artists, re-imagining the relationship between the room, the performers, the audience, and Issue’s Floating Points Hemisphere speaker system.

David Schafer was born in Kansas City, MO and received his BA from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, MO, and his MFA from the University of Texas, Austin, TX. He moved to NY in 1983 and spent 10 years in LA. He currently lives and works in NY since 2006.

David Schafer is a visual and sound artist working in sculpture, sound, sound performance, and graphics. His work embodies language, site, and architecture through the appropriation of modernist tropes, popular culture, and theory. His work is concerned with the intelligibility, translation, and structures of language and architecture. Much of his work stems from this complex of situations, both spatial and linguistic.

Schafer has shown nationally and internationally and has received several public commissions. Most recently he participated in LOL: A Decade in Antic Art at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, MD. In 2010, he permanently installed Separated United Forms at the Huntington Hospital, Pasadena, CA, and participated in the Whitney Biennial with What Should a Museum Sound Like?, a sound performance and sculpture.

Schafer is currently a visiting critic for Cornell Art and Architecture Program in NY, and has previously taught at SVA, Cooper Union, Rutgers, and Parsons in NY and Otis, Cal Arts, and Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where he was the director of the sculpture and installation track.

9/27 w. installation artist Chris Harvey
9/28 w. installation artist David Schafer
9/29 w. installation artists Steve Milton and Vince Pan
9/20 w. installation artists Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter

ISSUE’s Floating Points series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The James E. Robison Foundation.