cool event at big bear

May 29
Bernard Welt (text) & Colby Caldwell (projections)
BLK w/ BEAR (audio art)

Bernard Welt is a fiction writer, poet, essayist, playwright & consummate genre-blurrer. His fiction and poetry have appeared in art catalogs, including Splat! Boom! Pow!, The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art and Raymond Pettibon: A Reader. His essays for the Los Angeles journal Art Issues are collected in Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art.

Colby Caldwell is a DC visual arts fixure and pretty good with a shotgun. Since the late 1980’s, he has had solo and group exhibitions, lectured at various universities and colleges, collaborated with other artists and published catalogues. He has exhibited at the Kathleen Ewing Gallery in Washington, D.C. (1988-1989), the Emilio Navarro Gallery in Madrid, Spain (1992-1993), as well as several times at Hemphill Fine Arts, located in Washington, D.C., where he exhibited [still life] in 2003. Among his many group exhibitions, in 1991 he exhibited “Portraits” in Basel, Switzerland and in 1996, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, Caldwell’s work was shown in an exhibition called “Reimagining the Real”. In 1999, he collaborated with Bernard Welt on Ordinary Eternal Machinery, a video piece. His work was recently selected for inclusion in the 2005 Corcoran Biennial, Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D. C.

BLK w/BEAR is JS Adams [loops; turntables; prepared vinyl] and Doug Poplin [cello; effects]. Performances and temporal turntable installations– staged in art spaces across the Metro DC area and in NYC’s Tribeca arts district — include forced physical and electronic looping of altered vinyl recordings, found sound and media decay with manipulated voice synthesis.