MEN performed at the opening reception for Tierra. Sangre. Oro. MEN is a Brooklyn-based band and art/performance collective led by Le Tigre’s JD Samson and Michael O’Neill. MEN believe in the radical potential of dance music and its power to demand liberties through invention and play. 

This was the group’s first performance in several years and included new and iconic music and performance as well as new tracks from each artist’s solo projects. 

Ballroom Marfa, in collaboration with the Judd Foundation and Marfa Solar System, hosted Freedom Solar Power for a Marfa Solar Social in the Ballroom courtyard. Members of Sun Power and Freedom Solar spoke on the benefits of renewable energy, regional solar rebates, and solar power technology. 

Ballroom’s collaboration with Freedom Solar grew out of stone circle – a large-scale, site-specific public art project by artist Haroon Mirza. Inspired by ancient megaliths, the stone circle was installed semi-permanently at a site accessible to the public just outside of Marfa. The work features black marble boulders that produce patterns of electronic sound and light from energy generated by solar panels. Freedom Solar generously provided in-kind support for Mirza’s installation, helping us realize this ambitious project. The stone circle is a continuation of Ballroom Marfa’s mission to commission internationally-relevant artworks that respond to and engage with our community and environment.

Ballroom Marfa presented a screening of Through the Repellent Fence: A Land Art Film, followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Sam Wainwright Douglas, artist Raven Chacon, and producer David Harstein.

Through the Repellent Fence: A Land Art Film follows art collective Postcommodity as they strive to construct Repellent Fence, a two-mile long outdoor artwork that straddled the U.S.-Mexico border. Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist, three Native American artists who “put land art in a tribal context.” Aided by the communities on both sides of the border in 2015, the artists installed a series of 28 inflatable spheres emblazoned with an insignia known as the “open eye” that has existed in Indigenous cultures from South America to Canada for thousands of years. The spheres were evenly spaced apart and extended north and south of the border a mile in each direction. 

The film provides an intimate glimpse into the arduous process behind creating an ambitious artwork that gives voice to the shared history and enduring culture of Indigenous societies that have made the region their home for thousands of years before a border ever divided it. Interwoven with this thread are lush scenes using stunning cinematography to absorb viewers into striking land art environments that have preceded Postcommodity’s work. Scenes with other artists and intellectuals working in the land art realm provide context and insight as well. These include scenes with Chris Taylor of Texas Tech University’s Land Arts of the American West program, writer Lucy Lippard and Matt Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. 

This event was free and open to the public.

Ballroom Marfa hosted Maria Minerva in the courtyard on Thursday, July 6, 2017. Her performance was preceded by a “sunset tent” set by W. Creeves, and the evening featured visual accompaniment by VJ Mellow Arms. Wienertown, the latest contender on the Marfa culinary scene, served hot dogs.

This event was free and open to the public.

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Ballroom joined forces with Summer Shake Up, offered by Marfa ISD in collaboration with other community partner organizations. The summer camp was with breakfast, lunch, and transportation provided. Students grades five through eight were invited to participate.

For this year’s DJ Camp, DJ Bigface (aka Javier Arredondo) returned to the Big Bend to offer essential guidance in real-live party-rocking skills. He was joined by two members of the Chulita Vinyl Club, an all-girl, all-vinyl club for self-identifying women of color.  Students learned directly on DJ equipment and experimented with mixing songs and sampling music. The classes were designed to engage the imagination of students from all musical backgrounds. While getting practical experience on the equipment is a core component of the camp, Bigface and Chulita Vinyl Club also presented DJing as an art form with a rich culture and history, with portions of each class covering the history of the DJ and basic music theory.

The Capri, Ballroom Marfa, and Carolyn Pfeiffer presented a screening of the documentary Tower, followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Keith Maitland and Sarah Wilson.

On what seemed like a typical summer day, August 1, 1966, a sniper rode the elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower and opened fire, holding the campus hostage for 96 minutes. When the gunshots were finally silenced, the toll included 16 dead, three dozen wounded, and a shaken nation left trying to understand. Using a unique blend of historical archival footage, interviews and rotoscope animation, Tower reveals the action-packed, untold stories of the witnesses, heroes, and survivors of America’s first mass school shooting, when the worst in one man brought out the best in so many others.

Tower unfolds as a moment-by-moment re-telling of the events of the day, highlighting the fear, confusion, and visceral realities of the shooting rampage. After the gunfire subsides, the story shifts to examine the immediate aftermath for these individuals and for society. Finally, Tower steps out of the shadow of history to reveal the subjects as they are in the present day, exploring the legacy of the shooting through the eyes of the survivors of a story they’ll never forget, but in some cases had not talked about for decades.

This event was free and open to the public.

Strange Attractor explored the uncertainties and poetics of networks, environmental events, technology, and sound. The term “strange attractor” describes the inherent order embedded in chaos, perceivable in harmonious yet unpredictable patterns. Sound and music pervaded the exhibition, physically or latently, through production or allusion. Visitors were confronted with leitmotifs of capital, transmigration, and asylum.

Strange Attractor invited the collision of historical and contemporary artworks in diverse media, including Alexander Calder’s previously unseen, noise-making, hanging mobile Clangors from 1942, a sister work to The Clangor, which Calder described as “three heavy plates that gave off quite a clangor.” Calder described sound as being integral to the effect of “disparity” in his compositions: “Here was just another variation. You see, you have weight, form, size, color, motion and then you have noise.” Clangors was presented alongside Channa Horwitz’ numerological graphic scores 8th Level Discovered from 1982 and Sonakinatography I Composition XXII from 1991, as well as contemporary pieces from artists working in a wide range of mediums.

The exhibition debuted Agreements (5—10), a commission from Lucky Dragons, the collaborative project of Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck. Custom designed tuning forks were installed in the Ballroom courtyard, and their tones broadcasted throughout the town of Marfa on overlapping radio frequencies in a continuously evolving sonic sculpture. Listening while moving, one could hear geographical borders as they were crossed. The tuning forks, one double-sided and the other four-sided, resonate with two and four narrowly-separated pitches, respectively. Each pitch corresponded to one of the six radio transmissions, serving as the basis for the music in that signal. 

For the newly commissioned work Foreign Exchange, Phillipa Horan worked with a commercial biotech laboratory to produce the first large-scale figurative sculpture grown from mycelium, the single cell root system of mushrooms. Foreign Exchange came into fruition from an interest in democratic networks and systems with an absent central point of power: The mycelium material is similar to the Internet, and other organisms’ webbed biospheres, such as honeybee hives and ant colonies. The work is a figurative sculpture of Charon, the mythological ferryman who transports the dead across the river Styx, and was literally grown––at certain points it was alive and unpredictable, before being dehydrated in heat chambers, killed, and essentially stabilized. The biotech sculpture has a usable lifespan of 30 years, after which it will biodegrade and may be regrown by the artist. 

In addition to these commissions, Strange Attractor included Beatrice Gibson’s F for Fibonacci––a film that takes as its departure point William Gaddis’ epic modernist novel J R. An eerily prescient, social satire, J R tells the story of a precocious 11-year-old capitalist who, with the unwitting help of his school’s composer, inadvertently creates the single greatest virtual empire the world has seen. Using images from Minecraft, graphic scores, images from physics experiments, and cartoons, blended with takes from wall street: stock market crashes, trading pits, algorithms and transparent glass, Gibson assembles a complex work on systems, composition, sound and the dematerialization of finance and the avant-garde.

Known for his forensic audio investigations and advocacy work, Lawrence Abu Hamdan reflects upon the hybrid nature of accents in Conflicted Phonemes and the controversial use of language analysis to determine the origin of asylum seekers. Abu Hamdan’s map-based work offers the asylum seeker an alternative and non-vocal mode of contestation.

Robert Buck’s canvas “At the end of the day…” (Holding area, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center, Nogales, AZ, June 18, 2014) insinuated questions about the nature of beauty and globalization by evoking luxury goods, fashion and décor. The paintings rekindle recent headlines, and inexplicable, yet no longer uncommon, acts of violence. A single image of immigrant children detained at a border patrol station in Arizona — salvaged from scores of images available on the Internet, is cropped, inverted, multiplied, and digitally printed on canvas. Bisecting the repeating pattern of sand-colored images is a snakeskin print. Given this incessant backdrop, it’s not easy to know what’s “natural” and what’s not.

Haroon Mirza’s Cosmos and Supernova were created through a process of placing live peyote on blank PCBs (material usually used to make circuit boards) and running electrical current through them. The alkaloid rich juices of the plant oxidized on the copper, leaving an etched print. Graphically the prints resemble cosmological clusters not too dissimilar to the kind of visions these plants produce in humans, if consumed.

Thomas Ashcraft, a naturalist, artisan, and currency designer, shared Coins to be Traded for Shining Cake, a new body of work from his art and science project Heliotown. As a currency designer, Ashcraft wipes the old money symbols of kings, queens, and generals and instead sculpts coins representing microbes, bacteria, jellyfish, pollen, eggs, phages, and something he calls the ubiquitous “schmoo.” Ashcraft also displayed photographs of Transient Luminous Events in the Mesosphere––“sprites” captured from his observatory in northern New Mexico. Sprites are large-scale electrical discharges occurring high above a thunderstorm cloud, giving rise to a varied range of intricate shapes, occurring roughly 30 to 60 miles above the Earth’s surface. Whereas science can explain some aspects of their physicality, it cannot fully explain their shapes: Sprites can be jellyfish-like, carrot-like, angel-winged, wish-boned, columniform, and some are five times bigger than Mount Everest.

Douglas Ross’ abstraxi, is a 47 x 6.5 foot, Jacquard-woven, cotton tapestry. Its colorful yarn coheres into a nearly photographic panorama of rubble and tire impressions raking across an unsettled landscape. Ross observes, “The many images transmitted to us by our Mars rovers show, among other things, tread patterns from the probe’s wheels winding across that planet’s sandy regolith. They show that we are the aliens… The sculpture as folding screen or folding screen as sculpture carries the consciousness that every exhibition space and exhibition scenario invokes the claiming and delineation of territory.”

With this unique constellation of works Strange Attractor built on Ballroom’s reputation for using art as a lens to examine ecology, history, science and technology. The exhibition created an opportunity for audiences to apprehend meaning in an increasingly complex reality. 

Strange Attractor was organized by curator and musician Gryphon Rue.

The opening reception featured a unique collaborative performance by artist and musician Lonnie Holley and psych duo Tonstartssbandht, with visuals by Benton C. Bainbridge.

Marfa Myths is an annual music festival and multidisciplinary cultural program founded in 2014 by nonprofit contemporary arts foundation Ballroom Marfa and Brooklyn-based music label Mexican Summer. With Marfa Myths, the two organizations bring together a diversity of emerging and established artists and musicians to work creatively and collaboratively across music, film, and visual arts contexts. The festival is inherently embedded in the landscape of Far West Texas, and engages with Marfa’s cultural history and present-day community.

For more information visit marfamyths.com

Screening

Poet Eileen Myles joined forces with Ballroom’s Laura Copelin to present Dirty Gay Movie Night at the 2017 season of Marfa Myths music festival. The evening’s double-feature included two hot and heavy classics of LGBTQIA cinema: Bijou (1972) and Community Action Center (2010). The night began with a poem from Eileen and intermission offered a stretch by local yoga teacher Rae Anne Hample and acapella singing from Marfa-based artists Natalie Melendez and Tim Johnson.

Community Action Center is “a small archive of an intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art.” A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner’s 69-minute “womyn-centric” video work offers new perspectives on sexual aesthetics, gendered bodies, the meaning of porn and of sex itself.

Wakefield Poole’s Bijou is a trippy classic of American avant-garde cinema and one of the most psychedelic examples of ‘70s gay erotica. Shot on 16mm film, the story follows a construction worker as he explores sexual desire and erotic fantasy at an underground club. “It swerves from a near-documentary, realist mode suddenly into a kind of Russian constructivist passage, to an action car chase, a little grainy Warhol and falling we find ourselves in a Frank Wedekind play,” Myles writes of the film. “Sex is a such a rabbit hole in this film and we get treated to such a phantasmagoria of groping and grouping and kaleidoscopic rendering of sex.”

Both films feature graphic sexual content, and the screenings were strictly adults-only. Age restrictions aside, this was an inclusive evening of boundary-pushing film, poetry and community.

Arturo Bandini, a collaborative project/gallery by artists Michael Dopp and Isaac Resnikoff, hosted four shows within two exhibitions: Vapegoat Rising, Dengue Fever, Sim City, and Grey Goo Gardens, over a year-long installation in the Ballroom Marfa courtyard. These micro-exhibitions played off of and with the themes in their hosting projects After Effect and This is Presence.

During the run of After Effect, which was about transcendent abstraction and landscape, Bandini concocted Vapegoat Rising, which they described as a “percolation of fog and rock” and featured work by Josh Callaghan, Kathryn Garcia, Mark Hagen, Rick Hager, Yanyan Huang, Whitney Hubbs, Sofia Londono, and Barak Zemer. Mid-way through After Effect they installed Dengue Fever, a show that functioned as “a sort of Henri Rousseau delirium, a jungle of feeling, and a landscape turned inwards” with work by Kelly Akashi, Marten Elder, John Finneran, S Gernsbacher, Drew Heitzler, Sarah Manuwal, Calvin Marcus, and Roni Shneior.

Then, alongside the Institute for New Feeling’s technological themes in This is Presence, Bandini’s Sim City featured Edgar Bryan, Jason Roberts Dobrin, Michael Dopp, Liz Glynn, Kate Hall, Julian Hoeber, Nevine Mahmoud, and Mungo Thomson. Half-way through This is Presence, Bandini staged Grey Goo Gardens with work from Ed Fornieles, Sonja Gerdes, Joel Holmberg, Dwyer Kilcollin, Chanel Von Habsburg-Lothringen, Anna Mayer, Thomas Mcdonell, and Isaac Resnikoff.