Stay Gold: The Burchfield Penney's Anniversary Celebration
Dec 8, 2017 5:30pm — 11:00pm
Join the Burchfield Penney for an evening of art, music and the unexpected!
This event is free and open to the public.
Visual and performance artists
Josh Smith, What Color is Your Gold Standard?
Performing throughout the Burchfield Penney Art Center
If you don't have a favorite poet yet, Josh Smith performs for your consideration.
Muhammad Zaman, Nothing Gold Can Stay
Norman Mack II Rotunda
Muhammad Zaman is an Urban Artist specializing in calligraphy. He is a Resident Artist at the Buffalo Arts Studio since 2016, and has worked on many mural projects throughout the region. His work has been featured in private collections in Paris, France, Lisbon, Portugal, and Buffalo, New York.
Tara Sasiadek, Liminal Luminous
Atrium skylights
Drawing on patterns from the recent solar eclipse, and the dividing mechanisms of biological cells, a series of painted lenses is suspended beneath the foyer's four circular skylights, turning into "microscopic slides" when seen from the accompanying staircase, and into eclipsing celestial bodies when seen from below.
The artist, Tara Sasiadek, has studied philosophy, painting, and human development, and recently received her MFA in Visual Art from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is a founding member and the current President of non-profit Emerging Leaders in the Arts Buffalo, and serves as the Creative Director to Lakeward Spirits distilling.
Jess Widmer, The Boodlefants Realm
Collection Study
Do you dare let yourself be free to touch the art?! The Boodlefant is an interactive creature made for touching, sitting, hugging, exploring and dreaming about. Connect with your senses, imagination, and with the artist through this Creature.
Null Point, WEAVE
“Front Yard” Hallway (2nd floor)
Null Point is an initiative for new music and sound art, focusing on site-specificity, participation, durational performance, limit situations of performance and audition, and more.
Null Point will present WEAVE, a multi-authored, site-specific, interactive sound work. The work takes the everyday sounds of the occasion (speech, footsteps, etc.) as a point of departure, subtly transforming them through electronic means as a way to activate new perspectives on everyday sounds. Through recording and real-time processing, everyday sounds are transformed through spatio-temporal dislocation, equalization, ring modulation, distortion, and more, and played back through an array of dispersed speakers.
Timothy Noble, Roto-Operaismo
West stairwell/ spherewell
A spinning, whirring amplification device primarily for opera. 2014-2016. Materials: Copper pipe, stepper motors, plywood, plastic vuvuzellas, circuitry, speakers, plywood, acrylic spray paint.
BAM, Live, Laugh, Love & Stay Gold: The Gameshow
Auditorium, 6-8 pm
What does it mean to "stay gold?" For artists, for couples, collectives, friends, lovers, individuals and families? How do we encourage ourselves and others to stay gold, in tough times and throughout time? This multi-faceted piece will collect responses to these questions from the audience and weave them into an installation, an experience of sight, sound and audience interaction.
Buffalo Contact Improv Jam Performance Group, Where Do We Go From Here?
CEB wallpapered nook
Two dancers will perform choreographed and improvised movement and dance, exploring their world, themselves, their lives and their relationship. Stories will be told. Chapters will begin and end. They will challenge themselves and the audience to see the world through the eyes of children, adolescents, adults and elderly people, to maintain a thread, and to express the inner radiance we carry from birth through death.
Ginny O’Brien, Visible Scale
Glass wall in the reception space/East Gallery
Ginny O’Brien paints muscular and organic forces and create these tensions using color as a textural element to make shapes that produce whimsical or dramatic form. Moving physically through daily life can trigger a memory, a dream, or a temporary sense of place that in turn offers moments of inspiration. The titles I assign to my work often identify what, where, or how I was inspired to create my art. Compositions and the imageries generated emerge from the juxtaposition and intersection of the imaginative and the real.
Robert Allen and Suzie Molnar, Locker-Rama: Investigations Into the Landscapes of the Psyche
Coat room lockers
A site specific installation that depicts a continuous landscape across the inside of several lockers. In each locker there will be a diorama that interprets the landscape depicting scenes that evoke anxiety, frustration, hope and dreamlike/surreal feelings.
Stanzi Vaubel, The Indeterminacy Festival Presents: Braiding Sweetgrass [workshop]
Studio Classroom
The Indeterminacy Festival will go into its second year, this time exploring the concept of "Emergence" in which an unlikely confluence of things are brought together in the formation of something new. The festival is exploring emergence by using string as the primary medium with which to enact the felt-experience of threading, stretching, connecting, and binding new ideas into an interconnected whole. We will work across mediums with musicians (to create large-scale string instruments) dancers (who will choreograph ensemble works with string) visual artists, and specialists from English, Poetry, and Philosophy to Physics and Earth Sciences, in an effort to find new ways of "weaving" our relationships between the disciplines together.
Over the course of this year, we are hosting workshops in which attendees will be exposed to concepts of making music with string as well as how string games can be expanded into large-scale movement activities which exemplify the relationships typically experienced online within social networks, but rarely experienced as an analog equivalent in real space and time.
Buffalo-based creative technologist and game designer, JR Rodriguez, creates playful experiences meant to engage, enlighten, and foster social transformation. Several works will be on view and playable in the auditorium including: "I AM" - a typographic contemplation on the ego and self awareness of the Twistter'sphere, "Don't Shoot" - a Nintendo-era throwback that questions when and if there is an appropriate use for firearms, and "Don vs. Kim" a childish two-player battle for world domination. Additionally, JR will unveil an interactive work inspired by the Golden Year paintings of Charles E. Burchfield.
Auditorium, 8-10 pm
Cat Sinclair of the Stripteasers as Roving Sunshine
Performing throughout the Burchfield Penney Art Center all night
West End Gallery exhibition:
IMAGES of US by US
WNY Urban Arts Collective exhibition curated by John Baker
IMAGES “of US by US” is symbolic of the large number of African-American artists today that have broken away from the mainstream and created various aesthetic styles beyond that of traditional artwork. The result is that a diversity of creative styles are being blended along with traditional views. There is diversity being used to interpret both their cultural experiences and their own identities, from realism to abstract expressing themselves creatively. The variety of the artworks they producing are is more often not celebrated. These presentation of styles are only limited by the display space available. The portrayal of these works should speak to you while generally focusing on depicting a legacy.
Featured Artists: James Cooper III, Renee Brown, Betty Pitts Foster, Iris Kirkwood, Kerima Collier, Mark Gaston Pearce, Kobie Barber, Niaja Boles (HS Student artist)
Musicians
Reception Space
Whirled Music: 6:00 pm – 6:45 pm
"Whirled Music" is a duo that performs traditional pieces, original compositions and improvises "instant compositions." David and Ravi have both studied music from around the world. The two have played for 10 years together in many different groups. Adamczyk has an extensive knowledge of classical, Eastern European, and modern composition. Padmanabha has studied Raga and Tala of India with several master musicians. These two musicians unite their diverse expertise to create "Whirled Music".
Fragrance and Juan Cosmic Energy: 7:00 pm – 7:45 pm
Fragrance of YAH formed a new band called FragranceandJuan Cosmic Energy with her husband Juan. The couple sings exclusively about LOVE, in all forms. Fragrance and Juan Cosmic Energy is are an Afrosoul band playing afrobeat, R&B, Neosoul, Pop, Reggae, Soul, and Smooth Jazz.
20,000 Strongmen with the Sunshine Sisters: 9:00 pm – 9:45 pm
Twenty Thousand Strongmen are a midwestern grown, old timey folk band that is now based out of Buffalo, NY. They have been playing their honest and soul lifting melodies for over eight years, both as a duo and a four piece string band.
DJ dance party set by ToneyBoi from 10:00-11:00 p.m. in the Reception Space
East Gallery
dreambeaches: 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Buffalo-based art-rockers dreambeaches have established a rich, vibrant aesthetic. Now, with a debut EP entitled Disappearing Act on the way via Admirable Traits. With winding guitars and surf-pop harmonies set up a tidal wave of glorious sound. The group comprised of Corey Bzibziak (lead vocals, guitar), Jacob Peter (bass, vocals), Gabe Wells (drums), & Andrew Kothen (lead guitar, vocals).
Leroy Townes: 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Freight Stage
Erica Wolfling: 7:30 pm – 8:00 pm, 8:30 pm — 8:45 pm
With vocals like heavy butter, Erica Wolfling’s song structure and transitions are reminiscent of Tori Amos and Regina Spektor. She has a knack for catchy hooks and relatable lyrics, but veers from traditional chord progressions. It’s quirky and unexpected. She has a keyboard that she plays the keyboard while she sings. She is also a joke-tellin’ Ice Dragon. QUADRUPLE THREAT!
Kerry Fey: 8:00 pm — 8:30 pm, 8:45 pm — 9:00 pm
Having released her debut album, “Apocalypse, Baby!”, Kerry Fey is a guitarist-singer-songwriter who throws her honest life-experiences in your face through her brand of “cheeky-folk-rock”.