Fall Open House| September 26, 2015

Open RehearsalSeptember 26, 2015

The Watermill Center39 Watermill Towd Road
Water Mill, New York

Please join us for The Watermill Center’s Fall Open House on Saturday, September 26.

Join us from 12:00-1:30pm for a tour of our building and grounds as well as the recently re-curated Watermill Collection. Following the tour, at 2:00pm, will be an open rehearsal of resident artist Oliver Beer’s The Resonance Project along with the opening of the G.T. Pellizzi exhibiton. The day will conclude with an outdoor reception, weather permitting.

Make your tour reservation HERE.
Make your open rehearsal and exhibition reservation HERE.

About Oliver Beer’s Resonance Project
Watermill resident artist Oliver Beer, a British artist interested in the relationship between sound and space, presents his body of work The Resonance Project to the public in an open rehearsal. The Resonance Project consists of films, sound pieces and performances that use the human voice to stimulate architectural spaces to resound at their resonant frequencies, transforming them into vast architectural instruments. Every room, every space, has its own particular resonant frequencies—the notes at which it will most easily resound; and a room can be made to resound like a wine glass sings at the tip of a finger. This series has led Beer to work in extraordinary architectural and social contexts, from the Victorian sewers of England to the transparent skyline-tunnels of the Pompidou Centre and the austerity of a Renaissance monastery. The artist continued this series of works in April 2014 with a composition performed in situ for five singers at the MoMA PS1, curated by Jenny Schlenska and the Palais de Tokyo—giving the architecture its voice and revealing its unique acoustic print.

“Beer’s Resonance Project is wonderfully democratic in its various locations, reminding us that epiphanies can happen anywhere. The human voice, without electronic amplification, with no accompaniment other than its own recycled echoes, occurs to us as a beautiful revelation. The modesty of this work belies its far-reaching implications and the sheer pleasure it gives.” [Jonathan Watkins, curator and director of Ikon Gallery]

Within and alongside his work with sound, Oliver Beer creates subtle and diverse sculptural, installation and film projects whose provenance sometimes seems biographical; but in which his play with universal—often intimate—concerns draws on shared emotions and perceptions. In the diverse pursuit of these projects Beer has exhibited the linoleum floor from his grandmother’s kitchen; shot a Korean Western in the mountains of Corsica; and reanimated a sequence from Disney’s Snow White with the help of 500 French school children on the French Riviera.

About Oliver Beer
Oliver Beer was born in 1985 in the United Kingdom. He studied music before attending the Ruskin School of Fine Art, University of Oxford. His personality and his background in both music and fine art led to an early interest in the relationship between sound and space, particularly the voice and architecture. He has translated his research into fascinating performances in which spectators take part by the mere fact of their presence, and he makes sculptures and videos that embody, literally or metaphorically, the plastic expression of this subtle relationship and the way the human body experiences it.

Oliver Beer’s work has been the subject of many screenings as well as solo and group exhibitions, notably at MoMA PS1, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Farfa Abbey, Rome; Modern Art Oxford; WIELS, Brussels; the Hebbel Theater, Berlin; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; the Palais de Tokyo, Modules Fondation Pierre Bergé—Yves Saint Laurent, and the Lyon Biennale. Oliver Beer has also held residencies at the Palais deTokyo, Paris, the Villa Arson and the Fondation Hermès.

About Giandomenico Tonatiuh Pellizzi
G.T. Pellizzi was born in 1978 in Tlayacapan, Mexico. He studied philosophy at St. Johns College and graduated from The Channin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. From 2001-2011, Pellizzi co-founded and has been involved in various art collectives, including The Bruce High Quality Foundation, with whom he has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, PS1 MoMA, Centre Pompidou, PAC Murcia, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and various art galleries in New York, Zurich, Berlin and London. In the past year he has had solo exhibitions at Mary Boone Gallery in New York, Harmony Murphy Gallery in Los Angeles, and Revolver Galeria in Lima. He has also participated in exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Museo del Barrio Bien

Image: Oliver Beer Diabolus in Musica, 2014, (installation view). Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris / Salzbourg.
Photo credit: Charles Duprat