April’s CLEAT Series will present three sets from artists all close to the Elastic community. Dark Matter 2023 resident Carissa Lee will offer up their first performance on the CLEAT system where we’ll hear her use of field recordings, writing, Black southern culture (that includes medical histories, stories, music etc.) and voice to materialize emotions of grief, and isolation. Old friends and collaborators Regina Martinez and AJ McClenon work together on the CLEAT to present voice recordings, electronics, and abstract tape music textures. The artists parse through voice memos sent over the past five years. “How can the sonics of a friendship be pieced together through disembodied communication that’s full of laughter, full of sighs and what we ate today? How have we held space for each other in between the pauses, in between the aparts while listening to the same weather?”

Christophe Preissing will present Deconstructivism I: Plume, his first foray into combining cut up texts, phonemic deconstruction, and vocal tics, materials often left on the cutting room floor with recordings made inside a piano and detritus from various other projects. The CLEAT Series focuses on work composed for the 16-channel speaker system in our space, allowing audiences to experience different approaches to spatial audio.

$15 / $10 w/ Student ID – Tickets Available at the Door

Artist Bios

Christophe Preissing is a sound composer, intermedia artist, improvisor, producer, and creative instigator whose work engages the contradictions of liminality, memory and decay, perception and projection, and preservation and loss. He uses archives, mapping, and taxonomies to produce clouds of meaning to engage participants. His work—both intentional and indeterminate—relies on paradox and ambiguity, found and built objects, individual and embodied memory, and the happy accident. cpreissing.bandcamp.com

”Deconstructivism I: Plume is my first foray into combining cut up texts, phonemic deconstruction, and vocal tics–materials often left on the cutting room floor—with recordings made inside a piano and detritus from various other projects. Basically all of the materials I have been working with over the past 10 or more years. An outgrowth of my interest in non-linearity, disorder, and defiance, Plume, a literary figure created by the Belgian poet Henri Michaux, is full of random juxtapositions, fragmentation, and controlled chaos—a nightmare slap in the face.” – CP

Carissa Lee is a Chicago based artist that works with performance, sound, public intervention, workshops, video, and theater. She uses recordings, writing, Black southern culture (that includes medical histories, stories, music etc.) and voice to materialize emotions of grief, and isolation. Her work synthesizes her desires for an empathetic tomorrow that holds compassion for all people. . She is a founding member of the Suspended Culture art collective.

A.J. McClenon is a multimedia artist born and raised in Washington, DC and currently residing in Chicago. While communicating through text & language, movement, repurposed materials, moving images, and sound, A.J. ‘s work is driven by familial & collective grief, water, science, escapism, Blackness, geomorphology, US history, and the global future. Alongside artistic experiences, A.J. is passionate about teaching and community collaborations and is deeply invested in leveling the hierarchies of truth.

Regina Martinez, also remembered as selective listening, experiences sound as records of our connections and departures. Her current experiments draw from an archive of infinitely personal recordings she relates to as soundmarks: her father’s hands cleaning dried beans, drumline rehearsal after school, the flap of our clothes outside on the line, a creaky gate to home. Each captured moment becomes its own instrument, its own layer of composition, and a washing and wringing out of memory meant to be overheard like a poem again and again. Her practice evolves through commissioned installations, dj sets, live sharings and sound design for experimental film.

Official Website

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Tags: AJ McClenon, Carissa Lee, Chicago, Christophe Preissing, CLEAT Series, Elastic Arts, Logan Square, Regina Martinez