Echodes
Echodes is a audio visual performance with noise guitar, minimal composer, Rhys Chatham and experimental video artist, Angie Eng. This collaboration began with common interests such as improvisation, noise music, experimental video and the theme of mysticism. Taking inspiration from the trumpet and guitar of Chatham, Eng creates a series of videos based upon the ritual of bullfighting, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci (Bacchus in a Landscape), the owl symbol and sacred places for modern life.
Chatham’s trumpet sound is an amalgamation between Don Cherry’s free way of playing combined with Jon Hassell’s modal and rhythmic approach, all adding up to a sound that’s as fresh as early morning baked bread in Paris. Expect down tempo, flexistential insanity, side by side with hard driving stoner rhythms and the sweet sound of screaming black metal riffs morphed into hydrogen jukebox delay trumpet.
Chatham/Eng 2009
Bacchus in Vegas was inspired by Leonardo DaVinci’s painting, Bacchus in a Landscape. Deemed too sensual to be St. John the prophet, its owner Cassiano dal Pozzo had it repainted as Bacchus,the pagan god of wine and lust. The irony in this painting is depicted by live drawings of Bacchus paralleled with photographs of Las Vegas and archival footage of buildings being destroyed. She chose Las Vegas, as symbol for both paradise and hell, similar to the two perspectives of Leonardo’s painting.
In Matador’s Spin and Owls Know, she works with a mini-camera, props (a feather and tarot cards) and the software, VDMX. These objects are transformed into windows for Quicktime loops. Owls Know takes its inspiration from this symbol of wisdom. Matador’s Spin is based upon bullfighting as a quasi-religious ritual. The matador’s cape spinning “magically” turns into illusion when the bull’s charge is meaningless. The set of passes evokes a dilemma for the bull — is the experience: Real, Illusion, Real-and-Illusion, Neither-Real-nor-Illusion.
In the piece Holy Groves she combines photography with video. Holy Groves is about contemporary situations of over-consumption that has replaced spirituality. Images of parking lots, all you can eat buffets and electronic gadgets are composited into landscapes.