on view: Steve Parker
Fight Song
Steve Parker
On View: December 16, 2022 - February 11, 2023 I Main Gallery
Opening Reception: 6-8 PM, Friday, December 16, 2022
Artist Talk: 2 PM, Saturday, December 17, 2022
Art League Houston (ALH) is proud to present FIGHT SONG, an exhibition by Austin-based artist Steve Parker. FIGHT SONG is an installation and performance featuring a National College Athletic Association (NCAA) marching band performing sonic meditations. The project examines themes of healing, injury, and labor in football, drawing from legacies of sonic therapy, including 12th c. abbess Hildegard von Bingen’s liturgical songs, Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice, Anthony Braxton’s radical marching bands, and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Disease Thrower sculptures.
FIGHT SONG materializes in two forms: as a sculptural installation and as a halftime-style performance. The installation works like an immersive musical composition featuring an ecosystem of automated sonic sculptures made from salvaged marching band instruments. As audiences come into the gallery, they enter a constellation of invented instruments suspended from above and around them – like an exploded technical drawing of a marching band.
Parallel with the installation, the project includes a series of video works featuring an NCAA marching band performing sonic healing meditations in public spaces. The band, marching in full regalia, performs routines that activate the exhibition space with elements of continuous, live performance.
Artist will discuss the complex intersections of music, sport, art, sonic warfare, and healing at a public talk on Saturday, 12/17
Interactive installation for sustained visitor engagement
This project is generously supported by the Music Academy of the West Alumni Enterprise Award and the Mid-America Arts Alliance.
Artist Steve Parker
Image courtesy of the artist
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Steve Parker is an artist who works with salvaged musical instruments, amateur choirs, marching bands, urban bat colonies, flocks of grackles, and pedicab fleets to investigate systems of control, interspecies behavior, and forgotten histories. His projects include elaborate civic rituals for humans, animals, and machines; listening sculptures modeled after obsolete surveillance tools; and cathartic transportation symphonies for operators of cars, pedicabs, and bicycles. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Ashurst Prize (UK), the Tito’s Prize, a Fulbright, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Parker has exhibited and performed at institutions, public spaces, and festivals internationally. Highlights include the the American Academy in Rome (Italy), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas), CUE Art Foundation (NY), the Fusebox Festival (Austin), Gwangju Media Art Festival (Korea), the Guggenheim Museum (NY), the Lincoln Center Festival (NY), Los Angeles Philharmonic inSIGHT (LA), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), the McNay Art Museum (San Antonio), Rich Mix (London), SXSW, and Tanglewood. As a soloist and as an artist of NYC-based "new music dream team" Ensemble Signal, he has premiered 200+ new works.
Parker has been awarded support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, the Copland Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, and the Mid America Arts Alliance. He is curator of SoundSpace at the Blanton Museum of Art, Executive Director of Collide Arts, and a faculty member at UTSA. He holds degrees in Math and Music from Oberlin, Rice, and UT Austin.
ADDITIONAL WORKS ON VIEW
We invite you to visit the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft’s current exhibition, CraftTexas 2022, a group exhibition which features work by Steve Parker. The exhibition will be on view through January 28, 2023.