In between pressing February deadlines and a record-breaking snowfall yesterday, I managed to spend some time with Random Number friends Darren Jones and Ryan Roa. Through his Phenomena Project, Jones is curating an interesting program for the Trinity Wall Street Church by responding with a series of exhibitions to the church’s 2011 theme of “reading the scriptures through other eyes”. Not an easy task, especially for a self-proclaimed atheist.

In the current show, Ryan Roa contributes the kind of poetic and conceptually-driven installation that has come to define his body of work. Inside the small museum of Trinity Church, Roa has placed Re-form, a sculpture made of flashing emergency lights supported by a cleaved telephone pole, which recalls a downward pointing version of the cross of St. Peter.

Jones with Re-form

On the walls surrounding the sculpture are various hand-written and typed notes left by visitors as they consider the issues set forward through the exhibition and the church’s annual theme. These public communiques will be collected and presented in book format at the close of the exhibition. There is an effortless connection between the communicative power of Roa’s materials and the various levels of expression in the visitors’ notes.

SOFTlab, one of the most exciting experimental design studios in all of NYC, has a current Kickstarter campaign that offers really cool incentives. You can have your name etched in infamy for a mere $5. If you can scrape by enough to meet the $100 mark, you get your very own funnel of color and happiness. High rollers who pledge $2,000 get a tailored installation. As with everything SOFTlab does, the possibilities are endless.

$100 pledge

The funds raised through Kickstarter will go toward CHROMAtex.me, a killer installation at bridgegallery in NYC. Check out the SOFTlab studio here and an installation they did for a 2009 Random Number show here. If all goes according to plan, 2011 will see yet another SOFTlab + Random Number collaboration. Oh boy oh boy! Details soon…

Pedro Gómez-Egaña is a Columbian artist who made Norway his home after graduating from the Bergen National Academy of Arts. Trained as both a visual artist and a composer, Gómez-Egaña combines sound, sculpture, drawing, the projected image, and mechanical devices to present theatrical installations that recall the heart string-tugging grandiosity of Disney’s golden age.

Gómez-Egaña uses choreography to great effect in his performances. Simple gestures like pulling strings, or more complex actions, like plucking a magnetized miniature space shuttle from thin air with a construction crane, form the basis for his investigation into the subtleties of motion. His works are performed with an economy of movement, yet they are able to manipulate the viewer’s emotions.

In his poignant installation Swimming Sideways, a paper dinosaur skeleton wilts like a neglected flower. The skeleton is connected to a mechanical device by a system of cables that rely on tension to control the movement. As the cables are coiled to their breaking point, different sections of the skeleton are subjected to gravity, one at a time.

studio

He showed me the beginning stages of a project he is working on for Oktoberdans, an international dance festival held in Bergen. He is still working out the details, but the piece will combine expressive drawings, lightbulbs, and skateboard wheels that are connected to tripods so that they can move along tracks like a camera dolly.

for Oktoberdans