The New York Public Library

 

presents

 

An Artist Dialogue Series Event 

 

What Does Blue Sound Like?

 

Ellen Hackl Fagan

In conversation with

Joseph Celli, Hap Tivey

 

Saturday April 29, 2017

2:30 p.m. 

 

The Corner Room 
1^st Floor

  

The New York Public Library

Mid-Manhattan Library

455 Fifth Avenue at 40^th Street

New York, NY 10016

917-275-6975

 www.nypl.org

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Event is free. Registration is recommended.

Priority is given to those who have registered in advance.

 

REGISTER NOW

 

 The Corner Room doors open to public at 2:00 p.m. 
All events are subject to last minute change or cancellation

 

The Art Collection at Mid-Manhattan Library presents the site-specific exhibition What Does Blue Sound Like? by artist Ellen Hackl Fagan. This exhibition features The Reverse Color Organ (RCO) with an interactive web app that viewers can download to their iPhones or Droids. Their phones become a synaesthetic tool, enabling them to explore their own unique opinions about the sounds of colors. 

 

Joseph Celli composer, radio producer and virtuoso on double reed; and Hap Tivey artist and an early pioneer in the California Light and Space movement; join Ellen Hackl Fagan  to converse about  Fagan’s site-specific Art in the Windows exhibition What Does Blue Sound Like? at Mid-Manhattan Library, the communicative properties of color, and the potential and possibility of color emanating aural properties.

 

Composer/double reed virtuoso/radio producer/arts administrator Joseph Celli has been involved in some of the most notable developments and performances in American contemporary music and art since the early 70’s. He worked at the forefront of experiments in extending the boundaries of contemporary music in performances and productions with John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Kronos Quartet, Tony Conrad, Peter Sellers, and National Living Treasure Chung, Jae-Guk. As founding director of Real Art Ways in Hartford he produced over 3,000 events in all media including the American Premiere of Cage’s Empty Words with live satellite broadcast via National Public Radio. He co-directed two New Music America Festivals, in addition to performances in over 40 countries. His current radio projects include the weekly Soundprint: Asia and My Other Music (MOM), a program ranging from Zydeco to Zorn. 

 

Ellen Hackl Fagan is a conceptual, interdisciplinary artist and abstract painter whose interactive digital projects explore the nature of synaesthesia by pairing color to sound. Working with saturated colors when painting, sensitized the artist to color’s communicative nature as she built connections between color and sound through abstract paintings, photography and interactive digital technologies, inspring in her the quest to hear the sound of cobalt blue. She is the inventor of The Reverse Color Organ and the ColorSoundGrammar Game, two projects that enable viewers to interact aurally with color. Her process walks the balance between randomness and intention, like jazz music, revealing limitless possibilities for improvisation. Fagan has exhibited her work throughout the greater New York metropolitan area and maintains her studio and curatorial practice in Bushwick. In 2014, the artist expanded her independent curatorial practice into a full time business and is now the owner of ODETTA Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her awards include the RADIUS artist residency through the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, a $2500 grant and exhibition through the Stamford Museum & Nature Center, (Stamford, Connecticut). She was also shortlisted for an Art in Public Spaces Percent for Art Commission through the State of Connecticut.

 

Considered one of the original Los Angles Light and Space artists Hap Tivey received his MFA in Studio Art and MA in Photography from Claremont Graduate School. He opened his first studio in Pasadena where he created the first examples total immersion light installations in Los Angeles. The artist then made an unusual and remarkable journey to Japan and became a first generation American Zen monk, and pursued monastic life for seven years. Ultimately he returned to the United States to continue pioneering the phenomena of light as concrete experience. In New York, he continued investigating the emotional experiences and theoretical implications that light provided both in immersion rooms and objects that relied on light. Hap Tivey's projects include columns of light over water in Christophe de Menil’s Frank Gehry house and Claude Picasso’s tearoom in Paris.  His work has been collected by more than a dozen museums, including Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

 

Initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni in 2004, Artist Dialogues Series provide an open forum for understanding and appreciation of contemporary art. Artists are paired with critics, curators, gallerists, writers or other artists to converse about art and the potential of exploring new ideas.

 

The event is free and advanced registration is recommended. 

 

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