MFA to Showcase the “Turntable Art” of Clay and Fischer

from the Facebook page for this event

Between now and the beginning of April, the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (MFA) will be presenting its Spring 2018 exhibition, entitled Stories. The exhibition itself will be enhanced with both performances and interactive workshops. Two of the contributors will be composer Danny Clay and printmaker Jon Fischer, who will be presenting five workshops and one performance based on their ongoing Turntable Drawings project.

Readers may recall that this past June Fischer and Clay brought a “progress report” on this project to the Center for New Music (C4NM). Fischer’s contribution consisted of old vinyl records on which visual designs were created, which could change the structure of the surface and the grooves themselves. Clay then provided a collection of old-fashioned turntables on which these transformed discs could be played. Initially, Clay himself did the playing; but, as the evening progressed, attendees were invited to make their own selections of the records and set them up on one of the available turntables.

Clay and Fischer will use the MFA exhibition as a venue in which to continue this audience-participation approach to their work. They will present a series of five two-hour workshops, all at 3 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, with one exception indicated below in the schedule. (The first of these will be today, making this a last-minute announcement.) Each of these workshops will involve one or more additional performers, who will explore the possibilities of working with the Clay-Fischer auditory landscape as an environment in which to present their own work. The participants for each of the workshops will be as follows:

1. February 24: the duo of Theresa Wong on cello and Jeff Denson on bass
2. March 10: vocalist Amy Foote and poet Michael Wayne Turner III
3. March 24: poet Roy Doughty
4. April 4 (Wednesday): tape music composer Greg Gorlen
5. April 7: the Mana Saxophone Trio

There will also be a final performance, most likely similar to the one given at C4NM, that will begin at 6 p.m. on April 7 and last for about two hours.

MFA is located at 1150 25th Street in Building B. This is about two blocks west of where the Muni T line stops at 25th Street. Because all of these events are being held in conjunction with a gallery exhibition, there will be no charge for admission to either the workshops or the final performance. Just remember that the first working will begin in only a few hours!