Rhythmix Cultural Works Presents
Love Our Island Art Walk
Radical Beauty, Part 2
Radical Beauty, Part 2 Event Photos
On Friday, April 13th Rhythmix Cultural Works and the West Alameda Business Association will present three hours of art, food, craft vendors and musical performances on Webster Street. Three new art installations will be revealed in empty storefront spaces by visual artists ghost ghost teeth, Ginny Parsons and Chris Rummell & Dickson Schneider. Live music and dance performances from Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Maze Daiko and San Francisco’s Epiphany Dance Theater will accompany these installations, creating an extraordinary event for the whole family.
Wing Cutter, 2017, acrylic, ink, canvas, stained wood by ghost ghost teeth. Image courtesy of the artist.
Nature Trash Kites, mixed media, made by Ginny Parsons and students from her art camp. Image courtesy of the artist.
Art installations in empty storefronts enliven the theme “Radical Beauty”. April’s windows include the former Larry’s Shoe Repair on Webster and the former Back to Health Chiropractic Center on Santa Clara.
Untitled, 2017, artwork made with gold leaf on gatorboard by Dickson Schneider. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Live performances will feature sneak previews of Island City Waterways (ICW) roving art experience to be presented by Rhythmix Cultural Works at Crab Cove May 19-20. Art Walk attendees will experience world music and dance of Maze Daiko with Epiphany Dance Theatre in the empty lot next to Calafia’s Taqueria. Across the street in front of the US Bank, Gamelan Sekar Jaya will present one of Bali’s rarest ensembles, gamelan jegog, featuring bamboo marimbas with tubes up to ten feet long. Partnering with the West Alameda Business Association to launch 2nd Fridays and make this event more festive, there will also be several food trucks and craft vendors onsite.
With support from the California Arts Council, “Love Our Island Art Walk,” is an art-centric creative placemaking project that utilizes public art, storefront art installations, and music performances to activate Alameda’s historic downtown districts.
About the Artists
Simon Tran’s (aka ghost ghost teeth) work is about reconfiguration, resistance, and a hearty bowl of soup. There are sensibilities in his work stemming from post-punk, Vietnamese-American culture, retro video games, his daughter’s beautiful imagination, and his dad’s flea market finds. The organic shapes he makes reference to the human body through painting and wood cut-outs of organic shapes. Either a swaddled child or an contorted figure that inhabit the compositional landscape of patterns that stop, start, and overlap. Color is a strong influence on Tran’s work. He combines nostalgic colors that reshape memories. There is no resolve in the narration of his work, instead there are slow meditative builds that lead to chunky riffs that wormhole into hard-edged noise, all loopy-loopy and stuff.
Ginny Parsons is an Alameda environmental artist who paints with everything from laundry detergent to peanut butter. Her current work was made with kids weaving trash and nature into kites. Inspired by Tyrus Wong, the Chinese-American artist who painted Bambi and made kites in his later years, Nature Trash Kites celebrate Alameda because the island has always been a place for play. Parsons is a self-taught artist who has been painting for 40 years. She shows at Rhythmix K Gallery and Gray Loft.
Chris Rummell is a mixed-media artist, often combining elements of printmaking, collage, and traditional sign arts. Gold leaf plays an important role in his work, carrying heavy connotations around wealth, value, and social class. His work tends toward revision and chance, seeking to understand how we attach meaning to symbols and representations. By contrasting mechanical precision with the human hand, layered works speak to the place where reality and ideals meet.
Dickson Schneider lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has been represented by a number of galleries, including Big Pagoda, San Francisco; Donna Seager, Mill Valley; D.P. Fong, San Jose; and Ellis Pilcher Gallery, San Francisco. With the recession of 2008, the last of Schneider’s galleries closed. This loss of prescribed liaison between artist and public led him to create his current project, The Free Art Project, in which Schneider creates art works and takes them to the street or gallery to offer them to the public free of charge. The project has been presented at Aqua Art Fair Miami; Takt Project and Kunstraum Tapir in Berlin, where it was featured on Deutsch Radio; Paolo Mejia Gallery, San Francisco; T Moro Projects, Santa Clara; Start Up Art Fair, San Francisco; and the Torrance (CA) Art Museum.
About the Performers
Gamelan Sekar Jaya is a sixty-five member company of musicians and dancers based in the San Francisco Bay Area specializing in the performing arts of Bali. Formed in 1979, GSJ is now recognized internationally as “the finest Balinese gamelan ensemble outside of Indonesia.” (Indonesia’s Tempo Magazine). For April’s Love Our Island Art Walk, Gamelan Sekar Jaya presents three instrumental works for “gamelan jegog,” one of Bali’s largest and rarest ensembles. Emanating from West Bali, jegog is noted for its rhythmic energy, unusual four-tone scale, and powerful sonority of its bamboo marimbas.
Maze Daiko is a world music ensemble that continues to evolve by mixing Japanese taiko with West African drums and marimba, and European violin, creating an innovative sound. Seiichi Tanka, the father of North American taiko, has described Maze as pioneers of the art form. Artistic director, Janet Koike trained with San Francisco Taiko Dojo, and was part of San Jose Taiko’s artistic team. The members of Maze Daiko include Kathryn Cabunoc, Tina Blaine (aka bean), Carolyn West, and Elaine Fong have many collective years of experience in taiko or musical groups including Emeryville Taiko, D’CuCKOO and Rhythmix ensemble. This mix of musicians combined with Maze Daiko’s newest member, violinist Jeannie Mckenzie, create original music with a unique cultural style.
Epiphany Dance Theater was founded in 1997 by choreographer Kim Epifano to aid her work in sonic dance theater, a genre-bending blend of dance, theater and vocalization in which dancers, musicians, aerialists and actors work together to weave a story on stage. The company’s artistic focus is on large-scale multi-disciplinary collaborations, and since its inception, Epiphany Dance Theater has produced well over 20 major large-scale works of this nature. Epiphany Dance Theater has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Rainin Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, Creative Work Fund, Walter and Elise Haas Fund, San Francisco Arts Commission, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, California Arts Council, and others.
Epiphany Dance Theater and Maze Daiko will perform a sneak peek of Island City Waterways, 2018. Photo by Maurice Ramirez