Alex Czetwertynski

Currently : Brussels | Belgium

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For its second year, the visual arts component of Day For Night went deeper into risk. The new venue came with its own set of limitations—some hostile, some useful. We brought in about 15 artists and asked them to build works no one had seen before, at scales that threatened to overwhelm both the space and their previous thinking.

As curator, I'm after something specific—work that exists in the tension between immediate appeal and lasting discomfort. We're operating inside a music festival, not some white-walled gallery circuit, but that doesn't mean dumbing things down. The audience might come for the bands, but they're not stupid. They recognize when they're being patronized with shallow spectacle. The installations had to grab attention fast but leave something unresolved, something that follows you back to the real world afterward.

Artists

Hermann Kolgen - Av Performance

Shoplifter's "Ghostbeast" claimed the large cage at the main building's entrance. She filled it with her trademark synthetic hair—piles of it, colored and arranged into what appeared to be some massive sleeping creature. Projections played across this artificial pelt, suggesting dreams or restlessness, while a low, persistent audio rumble completed the illusion of breath. The piece worked on multiple levels: first as spectacle—this enormous thing imprisoned at the threshold—then as something more unsettling. The cage, meant to contain, instead became a frame that elevated. The synthetic material, meant to enhance human appearance, was repurposed into something deliberately inhuman. Visitors had to confront this ambiguous presence before they could access anything else.

Nonotak returned to Day For Night for a second year, with two pieces : "Highline", a series of reflective panels with LED tubes, spanning about 60ft, and "Shiro", an installation designed to house the musical performance of Takami Nakamoto and Noemi Schipfer (The "NoNo" and "Tak" of Nonotak).

"Highline" despite needing a distant vantage point to be fully appreciated, had the audience standing inches away from the reflective surface taking selfies and pictures of their friends. Commentary on our narcissistic time? Probably, but when seen in conjunction with the post-apocalyptic soundtrack that the lights were synced to, the world that was being projected back to us felt more like a clinically emotion-less future where the image we project is mediated by aesthetics we don't control, don't understand, but need to keep standing out.

VT Pro, lead by creative director Michael Fullman, created Bardo with is team, a piece that was somewhere between light show, light sculpture, and overly invasive surveillance system. The piece had two modes : an interactive mode where it tracked users in the space and focused groups of lights on them as they moved, and a programmed mode, where the lights followed a choreographed sequence. "Bardo" is a Tibetan word that describes "intermediate states" between life and death, as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Both VT Pro and AV&C, featured below, are companies, not artist collectives or individuals. Their work consists in executing (brilliantly) their client's vision. It was of particular to me to give them a chance to create a vision of their own, and to explore the idea that a company can be represented as "an artist" as much as an individual or a collective can.

AV&C returned to the festival with “Phases”, after their impressive "lull" installation in 2015. They explored a more geometric approach to light, in particular reflected light. Still playing with volumetrics to make light visible, and using scrim to catch patterns of imagery that only resolved once it had bounced on one of the mirrored panels, robotically spinning on a central chandelier-like structure, they explored an environment, both sonic and visual, that felt like a bit of a platonic cave, where we can only see the product of the light beam on the walls of an enclosed cavern that we dwell in. Mediated by moving reflectors, modulating the light, the result is only a "reflection" of the real.
A more complete breakdown of their piece can be found here.

Damien Echol’s “Crimson Lotus” was described in more detail here

Golan Levin had been working on versions of Ghost Pole Propagator for several years, and Day For Night gave him a chance to execute the idea on a large wall facing the entrance of the festival. Using laser projection and a kinect camera to capture passerby's and "extract" a bendy skeleton out of their physical presence, the installation produces something akin to prehistoric drawings. Ironically combining cutting edge projection technology and image analysis to produce what seems to be an extremely simple and "old" aesthetic, Golan played with our need to see technology driven art produce things we have never seen by showing us things we may have seen before, but never thought we would see again.

UVA's "Musica Universalis" was one of the clear highlights of the festival. Commissioned by the festival and premiered for this 2017 edition, it was comprised of 8 instruments, each supporting a sphere, a light and a speaker, they created orbiting motions around their respective "planets", sometimes in, sometimes out of sync.

Robert Seidel's work often combines organic and sculptural shapes with painterly motion design, driven by projection. I was particularly attracted to his work because of the contrast it offered to the "colder" more geometric work we had in some parts of the venue, and because his work is often particularly tied to the merging of old and new media (painting and sculpture in dialogue with motion design and "mapped" projection).

Ezra Miller, the youngest artist at Day For Night, has been working on code driven art for several years, mostly for the web. I was interested in giving him a canvas that would be 100x bigger than the biggest computer screen he would have ever worked on, and tie his work to the environment. Ezra took a camera feed from the main stage and used his real-time shaders to distort and react to the musical performances. Similarly to Robert Seidel and Golan Levin, it was interesting to see how old media such as watercolor or painting find themselves re-interpreted as code, and how attractive it is to see that translation done successfully.

Some quotes from the press coverage of the arts :

"Day For Night was an interdisciplinary love fest of light and sound that may have figured out the future of immersive music and art festivals." — Justin Joffe, New York Observer

"And if Day For Night is trying to disrupt the monotonous, stale festival scene with something new, engaging and thought-provoking, they’re doing a mighty impressive job. Houston, we have a solution." — Justin Joffe, New York Observer

"Between sets by Aphex Twin, Banks, and Sophie, attendees of Houston's second annual Day for Night festival made time to take in the best of the local art scene — whether it was the installations on the festival grounds (flickering light installations by the likes of Nonotak and Shoplifter) or sights around Houston like the famed Rothko Chapel." — Katherine Cusumano, W Magazine

"Although [Day for Night] just turned two, it is already establishing itself within the crowded sphere of its kind as a small but highly considered event..." — Claire Voon, Hyperallergic

"Part of why Day for Night stands out stems from its organizers’ strong efforts to give visual artists both equal and distinct footing to the musical lineup — the main draw for most attendees." — Claire Voon, Hyperallergic