Author: aaronmattocks

Kickstarter campaign for Stephen Petronio project

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Dear Friends,

As many of you know, I was asked to join a dance company called OtherShore last year, and have since had the opportunity to work with Annie-B Parson, Paul Lazar, Jodi Melnick and Bryn Terfel.  It has been and continues to be a richly rewarding artistic experience for me.

We began rehearsals last week for our most ambitious project to date.  We have commissioned Stephen Petronio for a quintet, The Social Band, with original music by Son Lux, to complement Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar’s work The Goats.  These two works will premiere at the Historic Asolo Theater in Sarasota, Florida on February 9-12, 2011, and we are thrilled with the future prospects of this program.   The dance/theater work of The Goats juxtaposed with the sheer virtuosic athleticism of Petronio’s choreography promises to be a fulfilling challenge for us as performers – to see dancers demonstrate such a full spectrum is a rarity, and we are confident that it will be OtherShore’s finest performances to date.

To sustain our efforts, we have launched a major fundraising campaign, online at Kickstarter, to support the artistic expenses associated with the project.  We have already been awarded a full creative residency at the Duo Multicultural Arts Center, which is pure generosity as it eliminates the need to rent costly rehearsal space, and as such has saved us thousands of dollars, but we still can’t do it without YOU!

We hope that you will join us in support of this exciting project – literally ANY amount you can give is a step closer to seeing our goals fully realized.

To be a part of our campaign, please click here.

Sincerely,
Aaron Mattocks

on behalf of

OtherShore
Sonja Kostich and Brandi Norton
Artistic Directors

SAVE THE DATE – NOVEMBER 18
jibilian_01 

jibilian_02

My first art opening – with my partner Aram Jibilian.  We will be showing the result of our recent photo/performance collaboration as part of a group show called Blind Dates.

The Blind Dates exhibition opens at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, November 19th, 2010
 with a reception on November 18th, 6-8 pm.  Free and open to the public.

144 West 14th Street, 2nd floor
New York, NY 10011
212-647-7778

 

Aram Jibilian with Aaron Mattocks as Arshile Gorky’s ghost
Gorky and the Glass House
 Inkjet prints, 2010

As suggested by some of the titles of Arshile Gorky’s well-known compositions, (i.e. Garden at Sochi, Khorkom and Agony) Aram Jibilian explores the idea of the late artist having lived in an “in-between” space or in a state of exile that afforded him no home other than that which he created on his canvas. To capture Gorky’s lingering spirit, Jibilian’s photographs take us to the painter’s final home in Sherman, CT where he hung himself, and where several neighbors have spoken of encounters with his ghost (New York Times, 2003). For Blind Dates, Jibilian and his collaborator, dancer Aaron Mattocks, create a series of images loosely based on a 1948 Life magazine profile that depicted Gorky looking out of his ‘Glass House’ onto an open landscape. Gorky, who witnessed massacres and the death of his mother by starvation, had a more somber view: although he appreciated the light that entered during the day, at night he only saw darkness to be looking in. Mattocks performs the role of ghost, wearing a mask of Gorky’s face from his iconic painting The Artist and his Mother, 1926-1936. Jibilian and Mattocks use the architectural structure of the glass wall to present a view of what might be the current home of Gorky’s ghost.