“September Spring” combines music, dance, painting, and installation at the Kitchen (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The Kitchen
512 West 19th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Installation open Tuesday – Saturday through October 10, free
Performances Tuesday to Thursday at 5:00 and Friday and Saturday at 2:00 & 5:00 through October 3
212-255-5793 ext11
thekitchen.org
Writer, photographer, and installation artist Sam Falls has created a beautifully intimate tribute to his late godbrother, Jamie Kanzler, with “September Spring,” continuing at the Kitchen through October 10. In 2013, Kanzler, who wrote poetry under the name September Spring and recorded music as Oldd News, died suddenly at the age of twenty-four. Falls has teamed up with dancers Hart of Gold, the New York-based duo consisting of Elizabeth Hart and Jessie Gold, for the durational work, which combines music, dance, and art in unique ways. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 5:00 and Saturdays at 2:00 and 5:00 since September 9, Hart of Gold has been performing an intricate dance on two stacks of twenty-four canvas rugs each, representing every year Kanzler was alive, separated by a translucent black scrim with a doorway at the center, in the Kitchen’s upstairs gallery. First, dabs of paint are carefully applied across each canvas. Then Hart and Gold, dressed in white, begin moving on the surface to the lo-fi, scratchy sounds of Oldd News, played on a turntable in another room. The dancers initially form a large yellow circle (Kanzler’s favorite color), then follow Falls’s choreography as they create a kind of action painting with their feet, at times evoking how a needle moves across a record, with Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lighting going from bright to dark to stroboscopic and one of the dancers changing into a black costume. The audience is encouraged to walk around during the show, experiencing it from changing lines of sight. After each performance, which lasts about an hour, the resulting paintings are removed from the stack and hung from cords; although the choreography and color and initial placement of the paint are the same for every performance, each canvas comes out different. The last performance is on October 3, but the exhibition of the paintings will remain on view for another week. Falls, who was partly inspired by Kanzler’s cover version of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” notes in a deeply personal statement, “Jamie had twenty-four dynamic years and over the course of the show the twenty-four rugs become representations of this time, blending the lightness of days to the darkness at the end, the colorful depth of the center, the core of every mortal life.” But despite all the sadness associated with the concept behind the piece, it is an exhilarating experience, focusing much more on life than on death. “September Spring” is part of “From Minimalism to Algorithm,” a series of works curated by Lumi Tan that examine the legacy of Minimalist art in the digital age.