SASSAS Presents
Blast! [10]
Garden Party & Fundraiser
At a Private San Marino, CA Home
Sunday, May 19, 2013

Featuring Art & Live Music by Louise Lawler, James Welling,
Lari Pittman, Dani Tull, Dos, Killsonic +++

Los Angeles, CA – The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS) is pleased to announce Blast! [10], the annual SASSAS garden party and fundraiser, on Sunday, May 19, 2013 from 4:00pm to 8:00pm.  With food, beverages, and a silent art auction, Blast! [10] will take place at the private home of the Hillenburg family in San Marino, CA. To celebrate its 10-year milestone, Blast! [10] will feature many of the artists and musicians who have made the event so successful over the years.  Works by notable artists such as Louise Lawler, James Welling, and Lari Pittman will be featured in the silent auction.  Live music will be provided by Dani Tull, Dos, and Killsonic.  Tickets for Blast! [10] are $50, $40 for SASSAS members, and can be purchased at http://www.sassas.org/blast.  A limited number of $30 student tickets are also on sale.  Event address will be provided privately to ticket purchasers.  For more information on upcoming SASSAS events, please call 323-960-5723 or visit http://www.sassas.org.

This summer, Blast! [10] comes to the San Marino home of the Hillenburg family, featuring music by Dos, the two-bass duo comprised of punk rock legends Mike Watt and Kira Roessler; LA’s avant marching band Killsonic; a raga and microtonal performance by artist and musician Dani Tull; and DJs frosty and Ale from the non-profit web-radio and creative collective dublab. The event also includes a silent auction featuring art by Chris Kallmyer, Louise Lawler, and James Welling, as well as exquisite corpse works that were produced specially for this event, including a combined Martin Kersels, Simone Forti, and Michael Smith work; a Taft Green, Alice Könitz, Stephanie Taylor work; and a Lari Pittman, Roy Dowell, Renée Petropoulos work.  In addition, Scott Benzel and Krystal Krunch will auction services.  Krystal Krunch (a.k.a. Asher Hartman and Haruko Tanaka) will provide an auction winner with a private reading given by this artist intuitive duo, and Scott Benzel will design a performance, derived from the site and history of the winning bidder. 

Tickets include food and drink, enjoyed in a beautiful San Marino 1959 post and beam modern, built by Buff, Hensman and Straub.  In 2007, it underwent a year-long facelift by the architecture firm Space International.  The gardens are by Kathleen Ferguson and are largely native or low water.  The house and the landscaping give a secluded feeling of floating in the tree tops.

More on Blast! [10] participants:
– Scott Benzel’s – work shows an ongoing fascination with the disjuncture between embodiments of popular culture – from the classical music score to photographic ephemera – and their accumulated meanings.
– Alejandro “Ale” Cohen – is the co-director of the Internet radio station and creative collective dublab.  Notable achievements as part of his work at dublab include creating dublab’s first film, Second Hand Sureshots, and producing a film series, dublab Vision Version.
– Dos – (Spanish for two, as in uno, dos, tres…) is Kira Roessler (Black Flag, Twisted Roots, Sexsick) on bass and vocals, and Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE, the Stooges) on bass.  Dos develops conversations between two basses and creates a landscape of low-end dynamic.
– Roy Dowell – explores the overlap of meaning created by the confluence of seemingly diverse sources.  His collages combine painted forms with elements from printed materials to create compositions that are abstract in the whole, yet filled with recognizable detail.
– Simone Forti – In a program note from a recent performance, Forti writes, “We interweave the flickering, fluid vision of the world brought to us by the news media, the writings of pivotal thinkers from the past, and our own personal experiences.”
– frosty – co-founded dublab.com in 1999, a non-profit web radio station and creative collective based in Los Angeles.  Since then, he has been steering this collective towards helping spread positive music, arts and culture.
– Taft Green – Commenting on Green’s work in Artforum, Jan Tumlir writes, “There is no way for Green to premeditate it, it simply has to be done, and the doing of it – the process of thinking simultaneously backward and forward from each individual point, the leeway narrowing steadily as one moves toward resolution – has to be factored directly into the work’s meaning.”
– Chris Kallmyer’s – work deals with how sound can explore and articulate the dynamic between the natural and the built environment. Working with everyday things like cheese, lawnmowers, sheep, or car horns in site-specific contexts, Kallmyer aims to make pieces that explore the processes, customs, and environments through which humans have altered landscape and place.
– Martin Kersels’ – body of work ranges from collaborative performances with the group SHRIMPS (1984-1993) to large-scale sculptures such as “Tumble Room” (2001).  His interest in machines, entropy, sound, and dissolution has produced work that examines the dynamic tension between failure and success, the individual and the group, and the thin line between humor and misfortune.
– Killsonic –is an experimental orchestra featuring over twenty members on brass, saxophone, accordion, and percussion.  Frequently on foot and en masse, the motley musical gang performs guerrilla-style in high traffic areas throughout the city and in a variety of venues in the Los Angeles area.
– Alice Könitz’s – “work documents the years in which modernism in Los Angeles became grossly detached from its intellectual roots.  Reintroducing these forms and design motifs as a visual language, Könitz uses the same denigrated idioms to provoke a new consideration of the art that surrounds us,” writes Whitney Biennial Curator Trinie Dalton.
– Krystal Krunch – a.k.a. Asher Hartman and Haruko Tanaka, is a duo of artist intuitives who see and respond to energy in the body, the psyche, architectural spaces, and artworks – their intuitive readings are traveling to the Hayward Gallery in London this summer.
– Louise Lawler – In her art practice, Lawler examines the settings and details of the art arena that are not immediately apparent.  This focus on the margins of art serves to underscore a poignant look at the art works themselves, which transcend their surroundings.
– Renée Petropoulos – has created projects and exhibited internationally.  Most recently, she has embarked on the project Among Nations (Mostly) with a performance “Analogue” (2012), “Venice to Venice” (2013) as part of Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A., and “Women in Surrealism” for LACMA.
– Lari Pittman‘s – work incorporates a cacophony of color, the blending of figuration and abstraction, an intricate and multi-faceted surface, and an expansive and oscillating image field to create an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary rooted in, and in constant discourse with, the history of painting. A formal and conceptual tension is always at play.
– Michael Smith’s – work has centered on his extraordinarily prescient and sympathetic character, the naïve, and somewhat inept Everyman.
– Stephanie Taylor – draws from an archive of linguistic twists – puns, rhymes, and otherwise – as the basis of invented narratives that are realized as works in sculpture, print, video, and audio.
– Dani Tull – is an artist and musician. As a musician he has collaborated and worked with a variety of artists and musicians including Jim Shaw, Marnie Weber, Raymond Pettibon, Eric Avery, Tom Watson, Jad Fair, and Tracii Guns.  Tull has also played in many bands including Polarbear, The Spirit Girls, Mythter, and BoyGeorgeMichaelJacksonBrown.
– James Welling – has been questioning the norms of representation since the 1970s.  His work centers on an exploration of photography, shuffling the elemental components of the medium to produce a distinctly uncompromising body of work.  Welling is also intensely interested in cultural and personal ideas of memory in his work.

Funding from Blast! [10] allows SASSAS to build on the success of programming, such as sound. and soundShoppe, as well as to add new programming to transition from a seasonal to a year-round schedule of events.  This year’s sound. concerts have already included the Los Angeles debut of Rangda, on February 22, 2013, featuring Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance), and Chris Corsano (Bjork and many others), with additional performances by Blues Control and Crooked Cowboy & the Freshwater Indians.  In addition, SASSAS commissioned new work by internationally recognized experimental duo MURAL (Jim Denley from Australia and Kim Myhr from Norway), which will be performed at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook on May 5, 2013.  Accompanying MURAL in realizing this new SASSAS commission were nine Los Angeles area musicians including Matt Barbier, Ted Byrnes, Archie Carey, Claire Chenette, Daniel Corral, Jonah Levy, Heather Lockie, Jake Rosenzweig, and Greg Stuart.  In addition to sound., SASSAS sponsored Ad Hoc #7 on March 14, 2013, featuring Bay Area electronic music luminaries John Bischoff and Anti-Matter.  sound. 2013 is curated by Cindy Bernard, Steve Elkins, Danny Gromfin, Kassandra Kocoshis, Gregory Lenczycki, Joseph Potts and Dawson Weber.

The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS) is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization that serves as a catalyst for the creation, presentation and recognition of experimental art and sound practices in the Greater Los Angeles area.  Inspired by the resonance that occurs when experimental music is combined with unconventional performance environments, SASSAS seeks to foster new collaborations and improvisation to spark further exploration in the field.  Programs include the sound. concert series; soundShoppe, a monthly workshop for experimental musicians; Ad Hoc, a project supporting touring musicians seeking to perform in Los Angeles, online concert archives at www.sassas.org and www.youtube.com/sassasdotorg; and soundNet recordings, CD compilations drawn from sound. concerts.  The organization is supported in part through grants from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Good Works Foundation, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, and the West Hollywood Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission.

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For more information, images, or to request an interview, please contact Green Galactic’s Lynn Tejada at 213-840-1201 or lynn@greengalactic.com.

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SASSAS Summer 2013 Calendar

Sunday, May 5, 2013, 5:00pm
sound. at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook: MURAL
New work created for the Overlook by internationally recognized experimental duo MURAL (Jim Denley from Australia and Kim Myhr from Norway)  and performed by MURAL accompanied by 9 Los Angeles area musicians.
www.sassas.org/sound/2013

Sundays, May 12, June 9, July 14, and August 11, 2013, 1:00pm
soundShoppe
Free, monthly, unstructured sound workshop/jam for experimental musicians and sound artists at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock.
www.sassas.org/soundshoppe

Sunday, July 28, 2013, 7:00pm
Ad Hoc [8]: Wrack
Wrack will perform a new instrumental work, based on the fictional song lyrics peppered throughout Thomas Pynchon’s novels V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow, at the West Hollywood Library.
www.sassas.org/adhoc

Friday, August 16, 2013, 8:00pm
sound. at the Center or the Arts Eagle Rock: Aaron Dilloway and Jason Lescalleet
The first ever Los Angeles performance of underground experimental/noise duo of Jason Lescalleet (Maine) and Aaron Dilloway (Michigan) at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock.
www.sassas.org/sound/2013

SASSAS’ new schedule also features the debut of two new programs designed for children: The Kid’s Play Cage summer educational workshop program and a monthly children’s concert series, soundSpark at the West Hollywood Library.