Friday, August 6
Opening: 6 PM
Live Performances: 9 PM
…
CRYSTAL LAYER SUN is a show featuring a tight-knit group of artists working within the deconstruction and convergence of organic and synthetic processes through sound; video; and interactive experience. Through merging both the analog and digital, with organic and synthetic materials, this group creates hybrid relationships which question the delineation between the natural and the man-made- promoting methods such as reproducibility; sampling and deconstruction from printed matter to live a/v. Crystal Layer Sun is a show that focuses within this blurred space and its hybridism, that is so unique to this generation.

Featuring…

Erik Wilson
Cyrus Tabar
Chris Ritson
Hailey Loman
Shemoel Recalde
Shalo P.
Evan Nesbit
Joshua Roberts
Chris Silva
Andrea Recalde

w/ Live Audio + Video Performances

Felt Drawings
http://www.myspace.com/feltdrawings
Great Willow
http://www.myspace.com/greatwillowmusic
Shimomitsu
http://www.shimomitsu.com/
Friendship Friends Forever
Omori

Curated by Vassie Constantine and Shemoel Recalde

Reception & screening to celebrate the publication of:

Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual & Spirituality at Burning Man

(Book with DVD by Lee Gilmore, published by University of California Press).

Every summer, thousands gather from around the world in the blistering heat of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for the seven-day celebration of art, community, and fire known as Burning Man. Culminating in the spectacular incineration of a wooden effigy, this festival is grand-scale theater for self-expression, personal transformation, eclectic spirituality, communal bonding, and cultural renewal.

In this deeply textured account of Burning Man as a cultural and spiritual phenomenon, Lee Gilmore explores why “burners” come in vast numbers to transform a temporary gathering of strangers into an enduring community. Accompanied by a DVD, which provides panoramic views of events, individuals, artworks, and, of course, the climactic final night, the book delves into the varieties of spirituality, ritual, and performance conducted within the festival space.

Lee Gilmore earned her PhD from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and is currently a Lecturer in Religious Studies and Anthropology at California State University, Northridge. Please join us to celebrate the culmination of over 10-years of the author’s research and writing!

Reception at 7:00
DVD screens at 8:00
Discussion with author/producer at 8:30
Book sales & signing at 9:00

(no cover. wine & cheese will be served. donations gratefully accepted to offset costs).

$20

Join us for an exciting evening of ducks, bubbles, accordions and Japanese Shamisen – you can’t get this kind of entertainment in ordinary venues! The Jellyfish Gallery is proud to announce the Bubbles and Accordion Cabaret, a fun filled event that has something for everyone!

Duckmandu is the stage name of Oakland performer, Aaron Seeman. A player with virtuosic technical skill, his repertoire includes, but is not limited to, 70′s rock, Broadway, klezmer, classical, country, Sousa marches and even a polka or two. However, Duckmandu’s specialty is alarmingly accurate accordion recreations of classic punk songs.

His 2005 release, “Fresh Duck for Rotting Accordionists” is a note-for-note re-make of the entire first Dead Kennedys album. Seeman also plays with the Romanian folk group Fishtank Ensemble, composes for San Francisco’s “Punk Rock Orchestra” and has recorded with Mr. Bungle.

Louis Pearl, The Amazing Bubble Man, got started in 1980 when he discovered a toy called The Bubble Trumpet. Selling this toy on the streets of Berkeley, he stumbled upon a slew of magnificent bubble tricks.

3 years later, he met Wavy Gravy who encouraged him to get on stage and do bubble shows.  26 years later, Louis has evolved this show into a wild ride through the art, magic, and sometimes even the science of Bubble-ology.

At this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Louis started doing bubble shows with live musical accompaniment by accordion player and vocalist Jetty Swart.  The result is a new enchanting brew of breathtaking bubbles and bubbly music coming together, creating a whole that is greater then the sum of its parts.

Jetty Swart, also know as “Yetila” found an accordion on her way from Amsterdam to Berlin, passing by New York and Mexico. She sings most of her songs in French: a punk-style gypsy celebration party where Nina Hagen, Edith Piaf and Kurt Weill finally met each other…

After many years as a serious graphic designer, Jetty switched her plastic computer keyboard for a pearl accordion one, playing on the streets of the south of France. Then the streets made way for real stages, where she met other like-minded musicians. In 2000 she started her band Yeti.

First covering old French songs and then creating her own (in French, s’il vous plaît!), she plays solo or with the band in festivals and clubs all over Europe and Quebec, and has recorded 2 CDs.

What is her music like? Let’s say… a punk-style gypsy party celebrating that Nina Hagen, Edith Piaf and Kurt Weill have become one.

Shamalamacord is Mike Penny on Tsugaru Shamisen and Aaron Seeman (Duckmandu) on Accordion.

They formed an essential element of the acclaimed Gypsy band, “Fishtank Ensemble.”

Shamalamacord draws from a wide range of styles, including Balkan Gypsy music, Classical, Klezmer, 1920’s Jazz, traditional and popular Japanese Music, and original compositions. As a duo and as solo players they are each actively engaged in extending the capabilities of their instruments. The Tsugaru shamisen is the most powerful sounding and popular of the three major types of shamisen, the Tsugaru style comes from Northern Japan. It has enjoyed a resurgence among young people in the last twenty years in Japan, and is therefore a tradition very much alive.

March 12 and 13, 2010

This absurdly hilarious show combines humor and gender bending with the serious topic of Death and how to make your inevitable encounter w/ the big guy (a.k.a. Todd) more bearable.

What would happen if Death, Himself decided he wanted to change the whole Death business?

That he was tired of the whole sordid mess?

Dorothy Truth, Douglass Truth’s mysterious twin sister, tells the story of how she became the first and only employee of Death, Inc., and how she’s helping to bring about an surprising transformation in both herself and the Death business.

While Death is still mandatory, Truth claims that there are exciting new options and upgrades in the works. “You can’t cheat Death,” Truth says, “but you can work with him.”

2 hours long, 5 songs, with an intermission.

6-11pm

Here It Is: Clowns, Dead People, and the Theater.

Fifty-two paintings by Douglass Truth.

We living beings at some ease in our overly-constructed realities sometimes need a little shock to wake us up to the bigger reality we’re always in whether we realize it or not. I’m not an artist who sets out to shock anyone simply to do so; there are too many such artists at any given moment. Shock for its own sake is little more than annoying; more noise and less signal.
My premise is that we living beings constrict our reality based on ancient habits and even more ancient genes; we make a seemingly safe little world which we inhabit as the central and crucial character. But the worlds of the non-living and the non-human continue to exist whether we pretend otherwise or not. What are our entry points into these other realms? I don’t propose to enumerate and in so doing limit the possible doorways. They are in fact limitless, since we’re talking about a living and evolving universe; it’s alive and evolving through and with us.
In my paintings, the harlequin, the clown, and other, more mysterious (to me) characters show up to show us, in ways difficult to articulate in our normal linguistic fashion, in which direction we might be coming from and going to. To encourage us to take a deeper look, not into the fashionable recreations of the underworlds that can be found without looking very hard, but into what’s really going on around us in the corner grocery store, our kitchen, our place of work, the cities in which we somehow, miraculously, find ourselves living.