Featuring work by: Adam Brandt, Aves One, Hot Boy Hert, Jackson Kelsey, James Powow, Jay Forsythe, Kc Russell, Monk, and M31

With an emphasis on self-gratification, Never Follow Suit is an exhibition that focuses on the craft of “style-writing”, other wise known to the rest of the world as graffiti. The line-up of artists involved showcase a wide variety in style through works of spray-painted aliases, paintings, photography, installation, and fond memories. A show that pays homage to the past and stresses the importance of a self-gratifying work ethic that resides in all of us. The title Never Follow Suit derives from a song by the Radio Dept of the same title, which samples a scene from Style Wars, a documentary on the explosion of the hip-hop culture in the early 1980′s of New York City, in which a young writer named Skeme states “All these other people who don’t write, they excluded, I don’t care about them– It’s for us.”

+DOG+ [California]
Steve Davis – electronics
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Ditch Mimes: [Fitchburg]
Frank Mabee – guitar, vocals
Jeffu Warmouth – drums, vocals
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Idle Wounds: [Lowell]
Pat Greer – electronics
Andy Phelps – electronics
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STTC: (Stop Touching The Corner) [Lowell]
Jim Jeffers – guitar
Adam Norton – drums

Produced by Lunar Plexus

Selected paintings and drawings from the Department of Fine Arts, UMass Lowell.

Participating artists – Jason Allen, Ashley Carey, Brittini Chandler, Rena Carrillo, Shana Cortez, Alexandria Derderian, Kim Donahue, Matthew Dunn, Alanna Gilbert, Rebecca Gordon, Duy Hoang, Stephen Kinney, Paula Korng, Jennifer Laferriere, Dung Le, Courtney Lemay, Lars Miller, William Oliver, Thomas Osmecki, Channate Phauk, Jensen Poutre, Eileen Ryan, Anna Struna, Jessica Tawczynski, Calvin Thomas, Victoria Valente, Rachel Zelinka

Curated by Stephen Mishol, image above Stephen Kinney.

Listen to Lowell: Field Recording/Sound Art Workshop
Instructor: Rick Breault

A three-session workshop: we will record street sounds, nature sounds, and mechanical sounds of Lowell. We will listen to these recordings and create a finished work for presentation at an LTC broadcasted listening party/concert at the 119 Gallery.

Rick Breault is a sound artist and musician. He performs solo and group improvisations using processed field recordings and electronics. He is a member of the New England Phonographers Union and brood (a sound/video collaboration). Rick has led field recording workshops at the 119 Gallery in Lowell. He studied computer music at Longly School of Music.

Produced by Rick Breault, Elaine Wood

Dionyso McDonas Duo: [France, Olympia WA]
Arrington de Dionyso – bass clarinet
Thollem McDonas – keyboard
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Frenette Lipson Nystrom Wright Quartet: [Philadelphia PA, New York City, Boston]
Jack Wright – reeds
Kevin Frenette – guitar
Evan Lipson – double bass
Johan Nystrom – drums
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Lak Pensado Wright Trio: [Salem MA, Lowell]
Andrea Pensado – laptop, voice
Stephanie Lak – electronics, voice
Walter Wright – electronics, drums

NEW MUSIC WITH ATTITUDE, NO HOLDS BARRED!

Arrington de Dionyso makes trans-utopian world music for a world that exists in fever dreams and hallucinations. Using performance and visual art, he traverses the nameless territories held between surrealist automatism, shamanic seance, and the folk imagery of rock and roll. Ecstasy vs Madness. Arrington tours constantly, and has also presented workshops on improvising with the voice throughout North America, Europe, Israel and SE Asia.

Evan Lipson, bass, draws on his varied experience as a performer to create imaginative free improvisation. Evan has performed in a variety of alternative ensembles. His improvisation credentials include participation in the NoNet Festival and performing with Stuart Dempster, Andy Hayleck, Matthias Kaul, Stanley Schumacher, Todd Whitman, Nate Wooley, Jack Wright, and many others. Evan has received both the American Composers Forum SUBITO grant and Meet the Composer’s Creative Connections grant. He studied string bass with Michael Formanek and Robert Kesselman and attended Peabody Conservatory and Temple University.

Thollem McDonas pianist and improviser, was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area of Irish and Cherokee descent. Not long after birth he began studying the keyboard repertoire from the medieval to the 20th century. After graduating with degrees in both piano performance and composition he dedicated his time for years in grassroots political movements and ecological restoration projects before coming back to music with his full focus. He is currently touring perpetually, as a soloist and in collaboration with many other individuals and groups.

Johan Nystrom is a drummer working with sound and things he finds on the street. Activities since 2005 include playing high concept composition in a large orchestra for pirate TV, gamelan, amplified food, and countless free improvisation solos and groups. He has developed a range of extended percussion techniques that have more to do with electro acoustic and microtonal musics than paradiddles, but he refuses to relinquish the musicality of simple sticks and skins. Rather than dissociate these two elements, he plays a traditional kit but with a jerky, polyphonic fluidity to move as if he played a pitched instrument: the drum is a voice. He has been active on the East Coast, USA, and in London, UK.

Andrea Pensado works with sound as a performer, composer and teacher. She has been using digital media and live interactive musical systems since 1995. She studied in Argentina and Poland. At first, she composed mainly for acoustic instruments. However, she gradually felt more attracted by different sound realms. Today, the abrasive digital noise of her improvisations is far away from her earlier pieces. Harsh dense layers of sounds, often interwoven with her voice, combine hybrid synthesis and sampling techniques to create a highly personal sound language, which reflects an intuitive, emotional and paradoxically also logical approach to music making. She lives in Salem MA.

Jack Wright: After teaching at Temple University in the 1960s and leaving academia in the early 1970s to engage in radical politics and community organizing, by the late 1970s Wright directed his energies into music. He is one of a very small group of musicians in North America that has played improvised music exclusively since the 1970s. Through years of near constant touring, often performing for audiences in cities and towns where improvised music had never before been heard, he came to be regarded as something of an underground legend. He has deliberately eschewed the conventions and socio-aesthetic limitations of musical careerism to pursue his own vision. Although his de-professionalized approach sets him apart from most musicians at his level of accomplishment, his art has always grown, expanded, and synthesized new information. He is unquestionably an original and virtuosic saxophonist, a master improviser who is deeply lyrical, with humor never far away. Wright tours frequently in Europe and North America (and in Japan in 2006), making new musical and human connections, bringing European musicians to the U.S. and bringing musicians everywhere together. He has made over 40 recordings (many published on his own Spring Garden label), performed in over 20 countries, and written extensively and insightfully about music and society for journals such as Improjazz (France) and Signal to Noise (US), as well as his own website.

A one-day convention of analog synthesizers.

12pm – exhibit, open to everyone
  6pm – dinner break
  8pm – performances featuring live video by Dr T.

Produced by Eric Crawley and Analog Heaven NorthEast.

Our CD release party featuring local bands who played here 2011-12.

Thursday May 3
$10 gets you a CD & beverage (with ID)

6:30pm – doors
7:00pm – open slot
7:30pm – Abram Taber
8:00pm – Bella Birds
8:30pm – Disembodied Poetics
9:00pm – Idle Wounds
9:30pm – Stop Touching The Corner
10:00pm – Old Grey
10:30pm – Los Bungalitos

Friday May 4
$10 gets you a CD & beverage (with ID)

6:30pm – doors
7:00pm – BiRdOrGaN
7:30pm – Jasper Som
8:00pm – O-AM (One-Armed Mist)
8:30pm – Sinbusters
9:00pm – FRIENDSHIP
9:30pm – Big Mess
10:00pm – Nenakata
10:30pm – The Big Sway

Production Abram Taber, poster & CD cover Stephanie Lak.

Thanks to our event sponsor Blue Hills Brewery for donating some of their fine product to make our event extra tasty.

Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein are creative forces to be reckoned with, and 119 Gallery is pleased to rein a portion of their individual and collective energies into the gallery this spring. Two Sculptors in Two Dimensions is a multi-media look at the converging and diverging paths, sensibilities, and media of these two artists, whose work runs the gamut from monumental outdoor sculpture to intimate statues, and compositions. Energy and composure proliferate in Dodson’s and Moerlein’s individual and collaborative work. –Mary Ann Kearns, curator

Both sculptors in wood, Dodson and Moerlein began working together several years ago. Since that time, they have shared artistic goals to realize their individual and joint creative efforts. Energized by their merger, they have undertaken large, public works, as well as individual series of prints and sculptures with corresponding themes. Their jointly created outdoor moose sculptures of wood saplings can be viewed towering majestically in downtown Nashua and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This public art project was followed by simultaneous residencies by the artists in the Swiss Alps. In Verbier, Switzerland, Dodson and Moerlien each created their own monumental sculptures. Listening to nature and their intuition, their pieces are as much a part of their environment, as in it. At the same time, these sculptures are intrinsically connected to each artist’s own body of work.

The experimental nature of Dodson’s two dimensional works represents uncharted paths for the sculptor. Dodson’s totemic animal goddess sculptures result from the methodical decisions and actions she makes wielding chainsaw and chisel to shape the wood, while interacting with its grain to create her forms in a fluid fashion. Her spontaneous prints and drawings allow viewers a unique glimpse into her sculptural process. This series of abstracted animal figures reveals her process of using two-dimensional works to explore various possibilities of form and color normally restricted by sculptural materials.

The natural forces found in Moerlein’s sculptures and prints are universal and powerful. Using earthy and spiritual elements, his organic creations are vessels of personal symbolism. Upon close examination his message reveals stories of personal conflict and perseverance. Juxtaposing mass and color, his prints are tenuously balanced with the same finesse as his gravity challenging constructions. Suspended in tenuous and powerful arrangements, they remind us of the strength and frailty which we find in our lives and the universe.

The different approaches and shared paths of Dodson and Moerlein’s art reveal a mystical unity they channel from the cosmos, as well as from the natural and animal world. With attuned intuition and inspiration, their art is balanced in natural harmony. “Birds of a feather,” the artists take wing in divergent, intersecting, and parallel directions. They will host a panel discussion about collaboration, shared effort, and individual vision prior to the exhibit reception, on Sat April 14, at 2 pm.

Dodson and Moerlein are exhibiting in Boston Sculptors Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary, in the University Gallery at UMASS Lowell, April 2 – 26. Reception: April 4, 5 – 7 pm.

Black Steel Peacock [Fitchburg]
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Gingerbred Kids [Western MA]
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Loup-Garou [Western MA, Lowell]
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BiRdOrGaN [Manchester NH, Lowell]
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Alto Jeffro [Fitchburg]

The CD release show for the 98th album “Consumer of Worlds” by central MA noise behemoths Black Steel Peacock.

Produced by Ryan Scott, Umbrella Gallery & 119 Gallery