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Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere: Layers of the City

a diverse chorus of people standing on a promenade looking straight to the camera
(Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere,  Layers of the City,  4K video, sound, installation, window graphics)

 

Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere
Layers of the City
February 2 – April 14, 2019

Opening Reception: Saturday, February  2 from 7-10pm

During the summer of 2017, while artists-in-residence at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, CA,  Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere  began research toward a new project that built upon their interests combining time-based media with songwriting, the voice, and civic participation.

In July of 2018, the artists held an open call for local singers and musicians to participate in the production, which culminates in the video and sound installation at GCAC.

They began their process with the question: How might we sing our way through the transformation of place?

Nevarez and Tevere’s new work Layers of the City reflects on spaces in Santa Ana, both inhabited and boarded up, of immigrant owned entities that passed through generations only to be pushed out by rising rents and revitalization plans. The stories of Santa Ana are the stories of Sunset Park in Brooklyn, of Pilsen in Chicago, and of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles – neighborhoods where real estate speculation supersedes communities.

With these processes in mind, Nevarez and Tevere wrote a song that follows the composition and form of a cumulative song. As the song progresses, so do the amount of voices singing the chorus. In the end, a larger assembly of bodies and voices come together, perhaps forming a community, a resistant cumulative process.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere are multidisciplinary artists whose projects and research investigate contemporary music and sound, the electromagnetic spectrum, dissent, and public fora. Their interests lie in the spatial simultaneity of performance and enunciation, reflecting upon political agency through lyrics, audio, and transmission.

Nevarez and Tevere have exhibited and screened their work at international venues including MoMA, The Guggenheim Museum, Creative Time, and New Museum in New York; Manifesta 8/ Spain; Museo de Arte Raí­ºl Anguiano, Guadalajara, Mexico; Casino Luxembourg, LU; Henie Onstad Art Centre, Hí­¸vikodden/Oslo, Norway, and elsewhere. The first US survey of their work was exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2016. Nevarez and Tevere have received fellowships and grants from Creative Capital, Art Matters, the NEA, and Franklin Furnace. Both were Studio Fellows at The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, artists-in-residence at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS), and recently at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, and Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana.

Tevere is Professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Nevarez is a musician, and Faculty at Parsons School of Design and the MFA Fine Arts Program at the School of Visual Arts, New York.