Screening: Iner Plats, 2020
Constellations in Motion, Hiding in Plain Light
Rijeka / Exportdrvo / 02.10.20 / 21:00
Rue Bainbridge, the duo of Gryphon Rue and Benton C Bainbridge, intersects expanded cinema and sonic art. Sound and light patterns are scores; visual rhythmicity suggests electro-acoustic events while their dynamics are translated into brilliance and density of line. Their projects are “high touch”, retrieving the primacy of intimate experience over the alienation of mediated, distant connections. During our forced emigration into the Metaverse, Rue Bainbridge have extended their practice into network performances, relaying experiences captured under conditions of vivid adjustments and articulated anxieties.
Rue Bainbridge is the first recipient of the Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota Video Art prize (2019). Rue Bainbridge have been presented by Roulette Intermedium, Pace Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, The Hepworth Wakefield, Slate Projects / Foreign Domestic, Center for Visual Music, Public Works at Governor’s Island, Andrew Freedman Home, and Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation. Rue Bainbridge is supported by Andrew Freedman Home Artist-In-Residence program in The Bronx, NYC.
Gryphon Rue is an artist, composer, musician, and curator born in New York City. Rue is the author of Strange Attractor (pub. Inventory Press & Ballroom Marfa), a “book of music” which interfuses images, texts and conversations with artists, poets, economic sociologists and ecologists to explore the uncertainties and poetics of networks, environmental events, technology, and sound.
Benton C Bainbridge creates media artworks, audiovisual performances, and site-specific installations with custom AV systems. Benton collaborates with a wide range of artists, including live oscillographics for two Beastie Boys world tours and Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer FX for TV On The Radio’s Staring at the Sun music video. Benton designed media art for 11 seasons of One Step Beyond at American Museum of Natural History. Bainbridge is faculty at School of Visual Arts MFA Computer Arts Department.
about the work
Rue Bainbridge: Iner Plats, 2020
Constellations in Motion, Hiding in Plain Light
To look at the night sky, you’d never know we’re in the midst of pandemic. City lights blaze—and music blasts—in defiance of death. The light pollution blots out all but the brightest objects. Ray said, “We should declare a holiday from light.”
Bicycling through the revelry in The Bronx with Raison Rivas, we saw two bright beacons in the sky; so bright, I thought they were planets. My phone taught us that both are part of Ophiuchus, actually binary stars, and close – Sabik is only 88 light years away, Yed Prior, 171.
Gryphon Rue and I discuss what we see in our work – what does it evoke, what did we invoke? Looking back at this AV improvisation with a half-year’s hindsight, we can see the moving constellations that were hiding in the light. Windstorms, sonar, insects, atoms/particles; above all, a space dreydl dominates the inner and outer space that we experience in this work. In Yiddish, “outer space” is oysveynixt plats; “inner space” is iner plats. Nun stands for the Yiddish word nisht (“nothing”), Gimel for gants (“all”). The letters represent the Hebrew phrase nes gadol hayah sham (“a great miracle happened there”).
We’re spinning the space dreydl to celebrate the miracle of speeding light particles that time does not extinguish. – Benton C Bainbridge
http://gryphonrue.com/ruebainbridge/
