Quiet Zone: A Tribute to Jed Speare

Photo by Kristophe Diaz

Non-Event and Mobius present
an evening of performances by friends and collaborators of the late Jed Speare

STRANGE ATTRACTOR with EL PUTNAM 
ERNST KAREL 
MORGAN EVANS WEILER 
playing a new work with Laura Cetilia, Jordan Dykstra, and JPA Falzone

with pre-concert reading of works by Jed Speare by his son Nate Speare 

Metropolitan Waterworks Museum
2450 Beacon Street, Boston  
7pm (reception: 6 pm in the Overlook Gallery)
Tickets: $15 gen admission | $10 students + Non-Event members

6pm - 7pm – pre-concert reception and book launch featuring new editions of Jed Speare art books for sale (cash preferred), published by Farpoint Recordings and a reading by Nate Speare of works by his father.

There is limited parking at the museum. If possible, please bicycle, carpool, or use the T (Reservoir or Cleveland Circle stops on the Green line). 

About the artists

STRANGE ATTRACTOR is a dynamic multi-dimensional series of collaborative ventures between ve artists, Anthony Kelly, Danny McCarthy, Irene Murphy, Mick O’Shea and David Stalling and guests exploring sound-based cross-disciplinary relationships to create non-verbal communication.

DANNY McCARTHY is one of Ireland’s pioneers of performance art and sound art and he continues to be a leading exponent exhibiting and performing both in Ireland and internationally. In 2006, he founded the Quiet Club with Mick O’Shea, a floating membership sound (art and electronics) performance group. A book + CD on his work entitled “LISTEN hEAR” was recently published by Farpoint Recordings to coinside with his exhibition “Listening With The Sound Turned Off.”

MICK O’SHEA’s works spring from his essential experience in drawing. In 2006 he formed The Quiet Club with Danny McCarthy to promote and showcase improvised music and soundworks. In 2003 O’Shea , Stephen Brandes and Irene Murphy set up the collaborative practice, The Domestic Godless which, through performative cooking events, explores culinary activity as art practice and tests assumptions about the cultural traditions of food in challenging and often irreverent and absurdist ways.

IRENE MURPHY’s work questions the role of the artist, creative space, and engages with a broader concept of creativity. A common link in her art are ideas about performativeness, site specificity and communality with Murphy’s art acts being private interventions into public space. She is active in initiating many collaborative projects such as The YOYO Club, Ideal State Agency, Electric Rain and the creative food trio The Domestic Godless.

ANTHONY KELLY & DAVID STALLING have been collaborating on a series of sound and visual works since 2003. Their work encompasses a shared practice of recycling ‘objets trouveés’ of sound, visual and text material in their ongoing collaborative sessions. In 2005 they founded the sound art label Farpoint Recordings, which is publishing both Jed Speare’s art books and a new volume of sound works.

EL (Emily Lauren) PUTNAM is a visual artist, scholar, and writer working predominately in performance art, video, sound, and interactive media. Her work draws from multiple themes and sources, including explorations of gender and sexuality, play, materialism, and the study of place, which she investigates through personal and cultural lenses. Her writing and research focuses on continental aesthetic philosophy, performance studies, digital studies, feminist theory, and examining the influence of neoliberalism on artistic production. She is a member of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group and a committee member of the Belfast-based Bbeyond.

ERNST KAREL works with sound, including electroacoustic music, experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, and postproduction sound for nonfiction vilm [film/video], with an emphasis on observational cinema. His recent solo projects are edited/composed using unprocessed location recordings; in performance he sometimes combines these with analog electronics to create pieces which move between the abstract and the documentary. Other projects include the long-running electroacoustic duo EKG, and the location recording/performance collective the New England Phonographers Union (with Jed Speare). 

MORGAN EVANS-WEILER is a Boston-based violinist and a composer, who maintains a busy concert schedule and has performed throughout the United States. He has collaborated and performed with Seth Cluett, Sarah Hennies, Mike Bullock, Dave Gross, Ryoko Akama, Jed Speare, Antoine Beuger, Magnus Granberg, Christoph Schiller and many others. He is director of the New England based ensemble ‘Ordinary Affects’ who have performed works by Eva-Maria Houben, Magnus Granberg and premiered works by Jürg Frey, Antoine Beuger and Michael Pisaro. The Chicago writer, Peter Margasak, wrote of his recent recording, “Unfinished Variations (for Jed Speare) “the degree of focus and the richness of Evans-Weiler’s sound-worlds are nothing short of astonishing.”

NATE SPEARE is a New York City-based performing artist, writer and teaching artist. He currently teaches with Everyday Arts for Special Education (E.A.S.E) at Urban Arts Partnership as well as voice and acting classes at InMotion Dance Center. In 2014, he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in Theater: Contemporary Performance from the cutting-edge Naropa University. Nate has also trained extensively with the Paris-based Pantheatre, where he received an advanced certificate in Voice Performance, Choreographic Theatre & Cultural Studies, and the Roy Hart International Artistic Centre in southern France where he was selected as an Artist-In-Residence in the summer of 2011. His first solo performance, “We Died of Thirst”, in which he followed Ronald Reagan through an underworld of madness, was named the Talk of the Town Winner of the New England Fringe Festival and was a finalist at The One Festival 2012 in the Lower East Side. As an actor, he has performed extensively in Boston-area regional theatre and summer stock, especially in children’s theatre and Shakespeare productions of the now legendary Foothills Theatre in Worcester, MA. As a teacher, he has led guest workshops in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Boulder and Europe, emphasizing the human voice as a vehicle for self-empowerment and self-realization.

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Boston Foundation, as well as grants from the Boston Cultural Council and the Brookline Commission for the Arts, local agencies which are funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. It is also presented with the generous support of WZBC 90.3 FM.