BASEMENT GALLERY OAKLAND

This October Basement Gallery Oakland welcomes Edward Symes and collaborators for an interdisciplinary media production event. On view October 9th-30th.

 

Portable Artist Studios is the design, production, and gallery exhibition of five portable “art stations”, each one designed, created, and operated by Edward Symes from five different artistic disciplines: Painting, Photography, Music, Performance, and Film. The project self-imposes one significant design constraint – that every material needed for each unique creative process will be required to fit within the confines of a portable suitcase or trunk, that may be transported anywhere, and set-up for art creation at a moment’s notice. Equipped with a portable art station, the creative process is reduced to the essential and an exercise in simplicity takes shape. Some examples: a suitcase that opens and expands to reveal a fully functional mono-printer for printmakers, a steamer trunk that secretly houses all the components for a psychedelic light show performance, and a small hatbox station that allows for splicing, editing, and viewing motion picture films.

At a live event on October 9th, Edward Symes will present and operate each station, creating art all night, and producing a variety of works for the audience to take home. In addition to the creation from each art-station, the audience will be provided copies of an instruction manual for the operation of each art-station. Afterwards, the art stations will remain on display in the gallery, and the public will be invited to attend and use the art stations, to create works of their own. To help promote the show, and document the creation process, a series of web videos will be created and released, leading up to the show, that gives a sneak peak of the artist’s stations being used by Edward Symes in different selected locations. Additionally, the show and event will be filmed, and a final web-video on the whole project will be created. 

 

Edward Symes is a producer, director, and founder of Here and Now Films. Edward has shot and produced short documentaries in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Guatemala, South Africa, and East Timor. In 2008 he premiered a 30 minute documentary film, Los Medicos, at the Jackson Hole Film Festival and edited the 26th Annual United Nations HIV/AIDS conference video. He created a five-part web series on the USS BOXER Navy Ship with global health organization Project Hope.  In 2009, he edited a six-part media series for OXFAM America on the mining industry in Peru. He worked as a cinematographer on the global music project 1 Giant Leap (Channel 4-UK), contributed to videos for Time Magazine and Yahoo! Assignment Earth. As an artist, his work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Visionaires Gallery in Paris, the annual Soiree du Louvre in NYC, The Untitled Space, Frontrunner Gallery, and Webster Hall as part of the Quarterly Art Soiree 2010. Edward is a co-founder of the NYC creative collective FRONTRUNNER.  He served as art show curator and gallery director for Frontrunner Gallery in TriBeCa from 2010-2012 and publishes the online art quarterly Frontrunner Magazine. Edward has taught documentary filmmaking with Barefoot Workshops and the Maine Media Workshops. He holds a degree in English from Kenyon College and an M.F.A. from Stanford University.