Opening reception: Friday Oct. 10, 6-9pm,
with performances at 7pm by Ro, Paige Alice Naylor, Andrew Tham
Visiting hours: Sunday Oct 12, 2-7pm
Closing talk: Sunday Oct. 12 at 3pm
Speakers burble in different corners of the room. A tapestry-length score prompts audiences with graphics, musical notation, and text annotations. Various vessels and surfaces marked in multi-colored patterns, for one purpose or another. by-passing-upon invites you into a critical fascination with water infrastructure, playing with possibilities in property lines and watery flows. At the center, curb stops – metal circles in sidewalks and yards covering the shut off valve in a water pipe flowing to a building. Marking division between state- and privately-owned pipes, a physical manifestation of property lines. In noticing, reading, photographing, moving and music-making, curb stops have acted as reminders to ponder the ways water moves with and against real and imaginary boundaries created by humans.
This project is only possible thanks to immense, immeasurable contributions from Alexandra Lakind, collaboration from Nina Vroemen, and assistance in many forms from Moser Lakind, Nearby Person, Ally Reith, Matthew Nicholas, Atlanta Improvisers Orchestra, Watershed Art & Ecology, Homeroom & Paul Giallorenzo, AKP Recordings, Matthew Sage, Samer Alatout, Tom Jones, Tressie Kamp, Sarah Kanouse, Corey Smith, Utile Architecture & Planning, Zander Raymond, Will Greene, Deidre Huckabay, Jeff Kimmel, Lia Kohl, Jasmine Mendoza, Zachary Nicol, Sam Scranton.
This project came together on the southwest shore of (Lake) Michigami with/in the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe. The coercive imposition of a Euro-American property system, facilitated here through treaties from 1795 to 1833, undermined the Anishinaabe and other Indigenous peoples’ territorial sovereignty. Such treaties ceded the land but not the Lake. Yet, this property system extends its reach to things as unnoticed as the pipes beneath our feet, carrying Lake to lips, lawns, and lavatories.
Bio
Ro(b)//ert Lundberg makes music, drinks water, plays with images and words. Their solo work focuses on the interaction of human infrastructure and the spaces it inhabits. Through slowly shifting rhythms in sound, language, and video, they attempt to reorient audiences to more-than-human relations hiding in plain si(gh)t[e]. Drawing sonic inspiration from the glitch minimalism of Ryoji Ikeda, the tuneful experimentalism of Arthur Russell, and the engrossing trance of Hamid el Kasri, Lundberg constructs performances that unsettle presumed relations to pipes, property, pollution.
Now based in Chicago, they have performed throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe at venues and festivals such as Big Ears, Roulette Intermedium, Norwegian BioArt Arena, and CURRENTS New Media Festival. They perform solo and in outfits ranging from improvising ensembles to art rock band JOBS, with collaborators including John Dieterich, Max Jaffe, Lia Kohl, Jessica Pavone, Zander Raymond, and Dave Scanlon. Their work has been presented at Bauhaus-Archiv, Artists Space, Gallery 400 at University of Illinois-Chicago, SITE Santa Fe, Harvard, and the Society for the Social Studies of Science, amongst others. They studied music at The New School and law and environmental art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Website: roberteplundberg.com