The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.

“When the fissures between mind and matter multiply into an infinity of gaps, the studio begins to crumble like the House of Usher, so that mind and matter get endlessly confounded.”

—Robert Smithson

Pierre Schaeffer’s term acousmatic music—recorded sounds, arranged on tape—produces the first audible interstice between sound and its source. By imagining the cut to be clean, the mechanisms of reproduction create a sonic fetish: the tape. The disembodied sounds of the tape or record, alienated from their sources, create a metaphysical field for exploration of pure sound isolated from the visible. This surgical move, meant to attack the opticentric nature of modernism, relegates the aural into the realm of representation and replicates the privileging of sight. But what is happening at the source? Is Pythagoras unaffected by his students?

Jana Winderen, a sound artist and acoustic researcher based in Oslo with a background in mathematics, chemistry and fine arts, begins her compositional process in any number of unpredictable locations: “in the boat or hanging on a rope in a crevasse.” Describing her work as blind field recording, Winderen often embarks on long treks to search for unique sonic environments to source sounds for her elaborate performances and installations. Using hydrophones to record biotic and abiotic sounds, she then mixes these recordings into her layered compositions—uncanny semblances of inaccessible places.

Winderen wants to bring “all the physical and emotional experiences [of the trip] in addition to the sounds in the mix,” to her work as a composer and installer. Intricate layers of reworked sound create a quality of underwater eco-realism, giving voice to living and non-living underwater forces. Winderen’s work is neither a purely objective representation of hidden worlds, nor purely subjective composition. At ISSUE (4/21), Winderen will continue her investigation into the sound of shrimp, exploring how the smallest creatures of the ocean use sound for communication, orientation, and feeding. Hydrophones—originally a military development—are repurposed, inadvertently producing unexpected qualities not informed by their original design. Here, the production of music and the study of cod are in excess of the technological thought.

One proposition of the Sonic Unconscious is that it supposes music to be a byproduct of another desire. Just as a bird song has nothing to do with human pleasure, it is still appropriated and aestheticized by humans. Bird songs are cultivated, but how do the birds take part in this?

Yolande Harris creates technological interventions in the gaps between phenomenal experience and mapped data. Her practice, fundamentally ecological in nature, takes sound as its primary material and subject and purports to unhinge anthropomorphic concepts through purposeful misuse of technology. Technologies produce machinic images—images or sounds not informed by human consciousness—as a byproduct of their intended purposes. Harris’ work explores this excess. Her project Sun Run Sun sonifies satellite signals through headphones, creating portable composition machines. These compositions are are always in flux, depending on the users’ physical relationships to the satellite.

Fishing for Sound, which Harris will present for The Sonic Unconscious, is a live composition incorporating sonified satellite signals and underwater recordings from hydrophones, grounded by clicking noises appropriated from psychotherapeutic treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The composition weaves together recordings of sonic fields outside of human perception. Through the aid of technological devices, the listener navigates—a metaphor often employed by Harris—through these renderings by way of the EMDR clicking, linking bodily movement, like the blinking of an eye, to the navigation of virtual space in the memory. In Harris’s work, sound is the material and central metaphor for the transformation of space.

Navigation is perhaps an apt metaphor for thinking about the above practices because it relies less on presentation of an object through image or playback, and instead suggests provisional linkages between the non-place of the work and the site of the presentation. In order to navigate, you have to be somewhere.

Gina Badger works in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, encompassing new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. Her current thematic concerns deal with urban ecologies and environmental histories, while her projects tend to blur the line between artistic production and reception of the work. Using what she terms critical prosthetics—prosthetic devices that carry out a non-normalizing or hegemonic function—Badger often works in small groups at site specific locations with these tools, creating embodied interventions and explorations in the field.

Transmissions: A Botany of Decolonization creates a critical prosthetic via a scored performance and tape manipulation. During a ferry ride from Boston to Georges Island (selected because of Boston shore’s historic relationship to colonial and military power), a performer listens to a recording of Badger reading excerpts from Winona LaDuke’s The Ethics of Collecting. This performer then recites a section, from memory, to a second performer. The second repeats the text to a third, who is reading a copy of Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. The third then recites a passage that she has been reading, which the second performer repeats, recording it over the initial tape of Badger’s reading. Badger records this performative action on video and plays it back, manipulating the cut-up tape in performance. The transmission of text is the material manifestation of colonialism, manipulating the reception through failures in the mneumonic and machinic function, a kind of de-performance of colonialization.

For The Sonic Unconscious, Badger will lead two afternoon plant walks (4/16 & 4/17) through the Gowanus Canal area with specially developed critical prosthetics exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds, followed by a reception and screening of a video that builds around an interview with herbalist and social justice activist Dori Midnight.

Experimentation here is concretely linked to being in the field, to an active exploration of heterotopic space. Expression is a conscious function of the symbolic realm; The Sonic Unconscious brings together artists working on site, working through a wide spectrum in order to elicit material change.

Mongrels, a short film

Chased around by the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh and equipped with perverted botanists’ tools, voices of divination and herbal elixirs, we will explore the neighborhood of Gowanus on foot and onscreen.

Badger’s work for The Sonic Unconscious will conclude with a free reception and screening of a video that builds around an interview with herbalist and social justice activist Dori Midnight.

Gina Badger: I am an artist and writer currently working between Toronto, Montreal, and various locations south of the 49th parallel. Working in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, my practice encompasses new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. My most recent body of work, Rates of Accumulation, encompasses a sound installation, a pirate radio broadcast, a four-channel video installation, a large scale drawing, and a series of performances. Diverse in form, this work is characterized equally by the stylistic influences of historical conceptualism, land art, and experimental radio.

Much of my recent work has investigated the time and politics of contemporary ecologies. With a tone both poetic and critical, I aim to sidestep the frustrations marring current debates around ecology. Projects such as Scatter and The Sound of Things That Are Too Big and Too Old initiate encounters with the city’s marginal landscapes and flora, abandoning received histories of North America in favor of abstract postcolonial narratives. Operating on an entirely different scale, Plants In Your Pants is a hands-on intervention into the politics of vaginal ecologies in patriarchal times.

I cherish the moment when it is no longer possible to distinguish a work of art from its reception—when some aspect of the work comes to new life because it seeps out of its bounds, intermingling with its viewers. This is the phase change through which art ceases to be purely representative or reflective and becomes political. Through all of my pursuits, it is the desire for this transformation that keeps me going.

Gina Badger is grateful to Dori Midnight, Eymund Diegel, Issue Project Room, Proteus Gowanus, Halo Halo, Nika Khanjani and Adam Rosadiuk for their support and insight.

Support for The Sonic Unconscious is provided, in part, by mediaThe foundation.

Mongrels, Part 2: Elixirs

Chased around by the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh and equipped with perverted botanists’ tools, voices of divination and herbal elixirs, we will explore the neighborhood of Gowanus on foot and onscreen.

Meet at ISSUE Project Room, from which Gina Badger will lead a field botany tour exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds in ecologies of decolonization. Advance ticket purchase is highly recommended as attendance is extremely limited.

Gina Badger: I am an artist and writer currently working between Toronto, Montreal, and various locations south of the 49th parallel. Working in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, my practice encompasses new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. My most recent body of work, Rates of Accumulation, encompasses a sound installation, a pirate radio broadcast, a four-channel video installation, a large scale drawing, and a series of performances. Diverse in form, this work is characterized equally by the stylistic influences of historical conceptualism, land art, and experimental radio.

Much of my recent work has investigated the time and politics of contemporary ecologies. With a tone both poetic and critical, I aim to sidestep the frustrations marring current debates around ecology. Projects such as Scatter and The Sound of Things That Are Too Big and Too Old initiate encounters with the city’s marginal landscapes and flora, abandoning received histories of North America in favor of abstract postcolonial narratives. Operating on an entirely different scale, Plants In Your Pants is a hands-on intervention into the politics of vaginal ecologies in patriarchal times.

I cherish the moment when it is no longer possible to distinguish a work of art from its reception—when some aspect of the work comes to new life because it seeps out of its bounds, intermingling with its viewers. This is the phase change through which art ceases to be purely representative or reflective and becomes political. Through all of my pursuits, it is the desire for this transformation that keeps me going.

Gina Badger is grateful to Dori Midnight, Eymund Diegel, Issue Project Room, Proteus Gowanus, Halo Halo, Nika Khanjani and Adam Rosadiuk for their support and insight.

Support for The Sonic Unconscious is provided, in part, by mediaThe foundation.

Mongrels, Part 1: Weeds

Chased around by the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh and equipped with perverted botanists’ tools, voices of divination and herbal elixirs, we will explore the neighborhood of Gowanus on foot and onscreen.

Meet at ISSUE Project Room, from which Gina Badger will lead a field botany tour exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds in ecologies of decolonization. Advance ticket purchase is highly recommended as attendance is extremely limited.

Gina Badger: I am an artist and writer currently working between Toronto, Montreal, and various locations south of the 49th parallel. Working in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, my practice encompasses new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. My most recent body of work, Rates of Accumulation, encompasses a sound installation, a pirate radio broadcast, a four-channel video installation, a large scale drawing, and a series of performances. Diverse in form, this work is characterized equally by the stylistic influences of historical conceptualism, land art, and experimental radio.

Much of my recent work has investigated the time and politics of contemporary ecologies. With a tone both poetic and critical, I aim to sidestep the frustrations marring current debates around ecology. Projects such as Scatter and The Sound of Things That Are Too Big and Too Old initiate encounters with the city’s marginal landscapes and flora, abandoning received histories of North America in favor of abstract postcolonial narratives. Operating on an entirely different scale, Plants In Your Pants is a hands-on intervention into the politics of vaginal ecologies in patriarchal times.

I cherish the moment when it is no longer possible to distinguish a work of art from its reception—when some aspect of the work comes to new life because it seeps out of its bounds, intermingling with its viewers. This is the phase change through which art ceases to be purely representative or reflective and becomes political. Through all of my pursuits, it is the desire for this transformation that keeps me going.

Gina Badger is grateful to Dori Midnight, Eymund Diegel, Issue Project Room, Proteus Gowanus, Halo Halo, Nika Khanjani and Adam Rosadiuk for their support and insight.

Support for The Sonic Unconscious is provided, in part, by mediaThe foundation.

ISSUE’s Littoral series

Talk, verbal stuff, is taken as a primary component, drawn from materials found in the work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure on various ancient and modern languages (the so called “Indo-European” languages). The detailed analysis of the sonorities of the ancient and modern languages, their re-elaboration and re-composition is finally embodied in a score-text, spread out on stage in its concrete dimensions through the language performance of the two sound artists. The body is where this vocal investigation takes place, digging in the primitive sound matter of language

Jacques Demierre (1954, lives in Geneva), pianist, performer, composer. His musical and sound work takes various directions: improvised music, contemporary music, sound poetry, sound installation. His compositions and sound realisations are concerned with the activity of listening and with sound space, and develop a very cross and interdisciplinary conception of music. He collaborates with many improvising musicians, Barre Philips,Urs Leimgruber, Thomas Lehn, Joëlle Léandre, Axel Dörner, Fritz Hauser, Sainkho Namtchylak, Hans Koch, Brandon Labelle, Jason Kahn, Butch Morris, Carlos Zingaro, Jaap Blonk, Barry Guy, Lucas Niggli, Sylvie Courvoisir, Hann Bennink, Rhodri Davis, Isabelle Duthoit, Dorothea Schürch, Phil Minton,…

Vincent Barras (1956, lives in Geneva), performer, historian, translator. He teaches at the University of Lausanne (history of medicine) and at the High Schools of Art and Applied Art in Geneva (sound, history of the body). He is member of Contrechamps Editions in Geneva (contemporary music and aesthetics) and programmer of sound poetry and art language festivals (La Bâtie Festival and Roaratorio in Geneva). He has published various books, essays, articles, on body theory, medicine and psychiatry, contemporary poetry and music. He has translated books by Galen, Edoardo Sanguineti, Theodor Adorno, Carl Dahlhaus, Georges Seferis, John Cage, Eugen Gomringer, Simon Cutts, Robert Lax.

ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

Veit Erlmann is an ethnomusicologist, musicologist, anthropologist and cultural historian who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published widely on music and popular culture in South Africa, including African Stars. Studies in Black South African Performance; Nightsong. Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa; and Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination. South Africa and the West. His most recent publication is Reason and Resonance. A History of Modern Aurality (Zone Books, 2010). His current research interests are the history of modern aurality; intellectual property law; and music, affect and Sufism in West Sumatra, Indonesia.

About Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality

Hearing has traditionally been understood as the second sense — less rational and modern than seeing, the master of all senses, the first sense. Reason and Resonance is the first full-length study to explode this myth by reconstructing the history of aurality and the process through which the ear assumed a central role in modern culture and rationality.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the early decades of the twentieth, scientists believed that resonance was the operative mechanism of the human ear. To comprehend the act of hearing was to recognize the existence of a sympathetic resonance between vibrating air and various parts of the inner ear. But resonance, by extension, also entailed adjacency, sympathy, and the collapse of the boundary between perceiver and perceived —  phenomena usually thought of as polar opposites of reason. As Veit Erlmann argues, however, with the emergence of resonance as the centerpiece of modern aurality, a new type of epistemology triumphed, one involving an intimate and complex relation between reason and resonance. From 1633 to 1928, philosophy and otology struggled to comprehend a set of strikingly similar problems regarding the foundations of subjectivity, truth, and sensation. Focusing on the materiality and material culture of listening, Erlmann lucidly elaborates a history of aurality that simultaneously provides a new history of modernity wherein the modern subject is neither deaf nor dumb, ocularcentric or logocentric. The subject of modernity takes shape in its uneasy struggles and truces with “cogito” and “audio,” the effect of the intertwined histories of thinking and hearing.

Reason and Resonance begins with a transformative interpretation of Descartes that counters the philosopher’s usual profile as the “founding father of the modernist visualist paradigm.” Erlmann then traces the genealogy of the “intimate animosity” between reason and resonance through a series of interrelated case studies involving a variegated cast of ontologists, philosophers, physiologists, pamphleteers, and music theorists.

ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund.

“Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983” is a three-day event organized by art historian Branden W. Joseph and musician David Grubbs to take place at ISSUE Project Room.  Its purpose is to examine the intersections as well as the failed encounters of art, music, and cinema in downtown Manhattan from 1978-1983.  In addition to an evening of panel discussions (Thursday, Nov. 4) among some of the most notable figures to emerge from the art, music, and film scenes of the time, the event will include a rare screening of James Nares’s no wave epic, Rome ’78 (Wednesday, Nov. 3) and conclude with a concert performance headlined by the first New York appearance in years by the fearless, crucial downtown band, Ut (Friday, Nov. 5).

Robert Longo: Untitled (drawing for Glenn Branca Album Cover), from the series Men in the Cities, 1981 Graphite and charcoal on paper 60 x 60 inches/152.4 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures Gallery, New York

Panel One

Director Beth B, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, contemporary artist Dan Graham, artist/critic John Miller, painter/singer/musician Taro Suzuki, moderated by Branden W. Joseph.

Panel Two

Fashion designer/guitarist Nina Canal, writer/archivist Byron Coley, founder of Love of Life Orchestra (LOLO) Peter Gordon, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, author Neb Sublette, moderated by David Grubbs.

Panel One (Moderator: Branden W. Joseph)

BETH B was a central figure in the New York No Wave cinema scene of the late 1970s, directing, with Scott B, such genre-defining films as G-Man (1978), Black Box (1979), The Offenders (1979), and Vortex (1982).  She was also a co-founder of the artists’ group Colab (Collaborative Projects Inc.).  Her subsequent work, including dramatic and documentary films, installation and videotapes, merge documentary and fiction, the personal and the cultural, horror and lyricism, with references that range from Artaud and Bataille to Jim Thompson and Brett Easton Ellis. For the past ten years, B has been producing and directing Network Television documentaries and is currently in post-production on a feature documentary entitled, New Burlesque.

KIM GORDON is an artist and member of the bands Harry Crews, Free Kitten, Bad Adult, and, most famously, Sonic Youth.  In the 1980s, Gordon’s astute articles on art and music, such as “American Prayers” and “Trash Drugs and Male Bonding,” were featured in Artforum and Real Life Magazine.  Gordon was also founder and co-designer of X-Girl clothing.  Her exhibitions “The Noise Paintings” and “Performing/Guzzling” were shown this year at John McWhinnie and KS Art, respectively.  This year also saw the publication of Performing/Guzzling, her catalogue/artist’s book (Rizzoli).

DAN GRAHAM has been a towering figure in contemporary art for more than four decades and was the subject of a comprehensive traveling retrospective, “Dan Graham: Beyond,” exhibited last year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.  His video Rock My Religion (1982-1984) has become canonic both as a work of art and as a critical interrogation of rock history.  Long a passionate and insightful music lover and critic, his most recent book, Rock/Music Writings, was published by Primary Information in 2009.

JOHN MILLER was briefly a member of the Coachmen, with J.D. King, Dan Walworth, and Thurston Moore, before moving to Los Angeles to attend Cal Arts where he joined The Poetics, with Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler.  He returned to New York in 1980.  Widely recognized as an artist/critic, Miller is author of The Price Club: Selected Writings (1977-1998) (JRP/Les Presses du reel) and When Up Is Down: Selected Writings (Revolver).  He was the subject of a mid-career retrospective by the Kunsthalle Zürich in 2009 and, this year, of a monograph, John Miller: A Refusal to Accept Limits (JRP Ringier).  He currently plays guitar in XXX Macarena and Dirty Mirrors.

TARO SUZUKI is a painter of vibrant abstractions, made in part by pulling a rake through layers of acrylic, a process he once described as “Minimal Action Painting.”  In the late 1970s, Suzuki sang and played keyboards for the band Youth in Asia, whose performance forms one of the highlights of Ericka Beckman’s film, 135 Grand Street New York 1979.  YIA performed Suzuki’s “shock opera” at Danceteria before making their final appearance at Tier 3 with a line-up that included Nancy Arlen and Richard Prince.

Panel Two (Moderator: David Grubbs)

NINA CANAL was born in South Africa, moved to London at age six, and then to New York City in 1976.  She played guitar in The Gynaecologists, with Rhys Chatham, in Robin Crutchfield’s Dark Day, and then in Ut, as well as in performance pieces of her own and by Robert Appleton.  Her day job was designing hand-painted fabrics for fashion designers and her own line of clothes, and she was one of the original SoHo Designers.  She now lives and works in Marseille, France

BYRON COLEY is a writer and archivist based in Western Massachusetts.  During the No Wave era he worked (and sometimes lived) at New York Rocker.  More recently he co-authored with Thurston Moore No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (Abrams).

PETER GORDON first gained attention with his Love of Life Orchestra (LOLO), which he founded in New York in 1977.  The full-length retrospective entitled Love of Life Orchestra is due from DFA Records in October 2010.  Gordon’s work has appeared on recordings by Robert Ashley, David Van Tieghem, Arthur Russell, Laurie Anderson, Rhys Chatham, Suzanne Vega, Flying Lizards, and David Johansen.

Polymath THURSTON MOORE is best known as a member of Sonic Youth.  He is also a tirelessly prolific collaborator and solo artist, as well as the force behind Ecstatic Peace! Records and the recently launched Ecstatic Peace Library.  His books include In Silver Rain with a Paper Key (Ecstatic Peace Library), Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture (Universe), and, with Byron Coley, No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (Abrams).

NED SUBLETTE is the author of The Year Before the Flood (Lawrence Hill Books), The World That Made New Orleans (Lawrence Hill Books), and Cuba and Its Music (Chicago Review Press). His recordings include Cowboy Rumba (Palm Pictures) and the forthcoming Kiss You Down South (Postmambo).  He is presently the Patrick Henry Writing Fellow at the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.  In the period under discussion he led his own band and played with Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Love of Life Orchestra, the Singing Tractors, and others.

November 3-5, 2010

Buy the three-night package for $25, a discount of $5.

The last several years have been witness to an increasing number of exhibitions, books, and archival audio releases representing New York art, music, and underground cinema from the years that hinge the late 1970s and the early 1980s.  The Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, the traveling retrospective Dan Graham: Beyond, Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s No Wave: Post-Punk, Underground, New York, 1976-1980, Marc Masters’ No Wave, Tim Lawrence’s Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, and the DVD release of Ericka Beckman’s 135 Grand Street New York 1979 all speak to a growing interest in historicizing this period of multidisciplinary ferment.

“Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983” is a three-day event organized by art historian Branden W. Joseph and musician David Grubbs to take place at ISSUE Project Room.  Its purpose is to examine the intersections as well as the failed encounters of art, music, and cinema in downtown Manhattan from 1978-1983.  In addition to an evening of panel discussions (Thursday, Nov. 4) among some of the most notable figures to emerge from the art, music, and film scenes of the time, the event will include a rare screening of James Nares’s no wave epic, Rome ’78 (Wednesday, Nov. 3) and conclude with a concert performance headlined by the first New York appearance in years by the fearless, crucial downtown band, Ut (Friday, Nov. 5).

About the curators:

David Grubbs has released eleven solo albums, the most recent of which is Hybrid Song Box.4 (Blue Chopsticks). He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with writers such as Susan Howe and Rick Moody, and with visual artists such as Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Cosima von Bonin, and Stephen Prina. He is an assistant professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College and director of the graduate programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA).

Branden W. Joseph is Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and a founding editor of the journal Grey Room.  He has written frequently on the intersection of art, music, and film, most recently in Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books, 2008).

“Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983” is a three-day event organized by art historian Branden W. Joseph and musician David Grubbs to take place at ISSUE Project Room.  Its purpose is to examine the intersections as well as the failed encounters of art, music, and cinema in downtown Manhattan from 1978-1983.  In addition to an evening of panel discussions (Thursday, Nov. 4) among some of the most notable figures to emerge from the art, music, and film scenes of the time, the event will include a rare screening of James Nares’s no wave epic, Rome ’78 (Wednesday, Nov. 3) and conclude with a concert performance headlined by the first New York appearance in years by the fearless, crucial downtown band, Ut (Friday, Nov. 5).

Rome ’78 (1978, 90 minutes, dir. James Nares)

Starring Patti Astor, James Chance, Bradley Field, David McDermott, Eric Mitchell, Lance Loud, John Lurie, Lydia Lunch, Anya Phillips, and Pat Place, among others.

British-born artist James Nares has lived and worked in New York for more than three decades.  He is known both as a painter and as a filmmaker, and his films were the subject of a 2008 retrospective at Anthology Film Archives.  Jim Jarmusch described Nares’s films as “luminous jewels scattered in the dirt—as varied and striking as his paintings, his photographs, and his train of thought.”  As a painter, Nares uses his mastery of the balance between spontaneity and control to create a single elegant stroke that pulsates with energy, relating to Franz Kline as well as to the cartoon brushstrokes of Roy Lichtenstein.  As a musician, Nares played with the Contortions and the Del-Byzanteens.