Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents
Rick Bahto, Julia Holter, and Mark So: we’re (still) living
Thursday, March 14, 7pm
MOCA Grand Avenue
Ahmanson Auditorium

Tickets: $12, FREE for members of MOCA or Los Angeles Filmforum (present your membership card at the box office to claim tickets; no free tickets will be issued without membership card). For tickets, go to moca.org and click on calendar.

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents an evening of new work by Rick Bahto, Mark So and Julia Holter. Working at the intersection of art, experimental music, and projector performance, these three artists come together for a unique event in which their distinct, yet related practices share time and space. Predicated upon dynamics that arise simply and incidentally as media combine in real time, the work shares in the pioneering spirit of composer John Cage and others, yet looks, sounds, and feels like nothing else.

you do what you can with this familiar thing in your grasp, you already know how, there’s nothing to it. it wouldn’t cross your mind to improvise. there is no picture. there are things going on in the world, each just something to pick up, put down

form isn’t something to be resolved, ever. you just have these pat things, on the move, doing what they do, which is also to constantly become other things. because they don’t live in a frame; just shifting things, unframed.

all kinds of shit happens when these things happen to share room/time. it’s anti-idealized.

in place of realizing a blueprint, something more like gardening. disinterested in a responsive relationship with culture, from the standpoint of a more or less shared, public line of consensus, and rather more inclined to cultivate the essential, unstable intimacy, the absolute locality, of things, actions, experiences. shrugging off the line in favor of a desire to … go deeper, explore dialects, mutations, perversions. do we want to make a new kind of pumpkin pie, or do we want to plant pumpkin seeds and pay attention, really see what happens?

Rick Bahto is an artist working primarily with 8 mm film, photography, sound, and performance currently living in Los Angeles. He has exhibited his work at a variety of museums, galleries, microcinemas, film festivals, conferences, alternative spaces, and scenic locations, and was commissioned to create a new work for Monday Evening Concerts’ 2010-11 series. He has collaborated on live performance works with composers Casey Anderson, Luciano Chessa, Julia Holter, and Mark So, and has participated in performances of works by these and other composers. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, and now teaches at Otis College of Art and Design and the Echo Park Film Center, where he is also a staff member, projectionist, and programmer.

Julia Holter writes and realizes melodies in Los Angeles, via various combinations of singing, recording, and playing keyboard. She sings alone or with collaborators in festivals, homes, bars, galleries, and, most commonly, churches, all around the world. She has released several records, including “Eating the Stars” (2007) from Human Ear Music, “Celebration” (2010) from Engraved Glass, “Live Recordings” (2010) from NNA Tapes, “Tragedy” (2011) from Leaving Records, “Ekstasis” (2012) from RVNG Intl, and more. She also collaborates on unique projects frequently with other artists including Mark So, Rick Bahto, Yelena Zhelezov, Linda Perhacs, Laurel Halo, Ramona Gonzalez, Jason Grier, Laura Steenberge, Catherine Lamb, Jesselisa Moretti, and Jana Papenbroock. She recently completed a series of summer/fall 2012 European and U.S. tours of her music accompanied by Chris Votek (cello) and Corey Fogel (percussion), playing venues/festivals such as Roskilde Festival, Bowery Ballroom, ZDB Lisbon, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Field Day, Andy Warhol Museum, Hollywood Forever (with Sigur Ros), Pop Montreal, and Moogfest. 

Mark So’s work explores ordinary situations in various open frames of perception and action through simple means of recording / transcription / reading, as well as changing experiences of silence. Over the past 10 years he has maintained a vast output of scores—primarily (but not exclusively) text-based—grounding diverse experiences of straightforward literacy, where suitable action emerges between complete adequacy and pure discovery. Some 300 pieces alone concern the poems of John Ashbery, and So’s Heliogabalus trilogy of operas for 1, 2, and 3 readers, combines Artaud’s text with one of his own. In addition to performing widely as an experimental musician, he has collaborated on unique projects with a range of artists including Rick Bahto, Chris Girard, Julia Holter, Eileen Myles, Julie Tolentino & Stosh Fila. So’s music appears on two 2012 cassette releases, from Recondite Industries (reading ‘Illuminations’/a book of palms) and winds measure recordings (sitting and listening). His work often takes place in anonymous, open environments, and realizations have ranged from instrumentals, spoken texts, and performed actions, to tapes, films, quasi-installations, and other, more fanciful/obscure manifestations.