Saturday, June 30
Opening: 6 PM - 8 PM
Performance: 7:30 PM
Curated by Alexander Lau and Lawrence Kumpf
Empty Gallery is pleased to present Thresholds of Perception, a retrospective exhibition examining the work of Swedish polymath Catherine Christer Hennix (b. 1948). This exhibition represents the most comprehensive gallery show to date by the avant-garde composer, poet, mathematician, and visual artist.
Hennix’s work was deeply influenced by her early years spent within the thriving Downtown NewYorkartistic scene of the 1960s and 1970s. During this time, she cultivated long-lasting friendships and artistic partnerships with such well-known figures as Henry Flynt, La Monte Young, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, and Walter De Maria who were at the center of recent developments in Minimalist sculpture, performance art, and avant-garde composition. Although perhaps best known today for her 1976 record, The Electric Harpsichord, Hennix produced an eclectic body of visual art - encompassing painting, sculpture and installation art which deserves to be re-evaluated.
Drawing on contemporaneous developments in Minimal sculpture and Conceptual art, Hennix used these formal strategies as a tool to express her unique intellectual cosmology which synthesises strands from intuitionist mathematics, Western metaphysics, Japanese Noh, and Eastern religious thought - an approach which her close associate Henry Flynt has described as “like a botanist grafting existing species to produce a hybrid”.
The opening reception will be followed by a solo trumpet performance by Iraqi-American musician Amir ElSaffar, a member of Christer Hennix’s performance ensemble Chora(san) Time Court Mirage, whose practice synthesizes aspects of traditional Middle Eastern music with American Jazz.
Catherine Christer Hennix (b. 1948) started her creative career playing drums with her older brother Peter growing up in Sweden. In the mid-1960s she saw jazz luminaries such as John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor perform at the Golden Circle, Stockholm. Directly after high school, Hennix went to work at Stockholm’s pioneering Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), where she helped develop early synthesizer and tape music.
After traveling to New York In 1968, she met Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles and developed a fruitful relationship with many composers in the burgeoning American avant-garde, including, most significantly, Henry Flynt and La Monte Young. Young introduced Hennix to Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath, and she would later study intensively under him. During this time Hennix led the just-intonation live-electronic ensemble The Deontic Miracle, drawing inspiration from Japanese Gagaku music and the early vocal music of late-Middle Age composers Perotinus and Leoninus. In 1976 the ensemble would perform Hennix’s original compositions as part of Brouwer’s Lattice at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which was followed later that year at the same institution by Hennix’s first ever exhibition, Topos and Adjoints. While Hennix continued to make music performing alongside Henry Flynt, Marc Johnson, Arthur Russell, and Arthur Rhames, she also served as a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at SUNY New Paltz and as a visiting Professor of Logic (at Marvin Minsky’s invitation) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She currently resides in Berlin, Germany, where she is active as a composer and writer. A two-volume collection of her writing is to be published by Blank Forms Editions, as well as a series of archival recorded releases forthcoming through a co-production between Empty Editions and Blank Forms Editions.
Iraqi-American trumpeter, santur player, vocalist, and composer Amir ElSaffar has distinguished himself with a mastery of disparate musical styles and a singular approach to combining aspects of Middle Eastern music with American jazz, extending the boundaries of each tradition. A skilled jazz trumpeter with a classical background, ElSaffar has created new techniques to play microtones and ornaments that are idiomatic to Arabic music but are not typically heard on the trumpet. Additionally, he is an acknowledged performer of the classical Iraqi maqam tradition and performs actively in the US, Europe, and the Middle East as a vocalist and santur player. He currently leads four critically-acclaimed ensembles: Two Rivers, the Amir ElSaffar Quintet, The Alwan Ensemble, and Safaafir, the only ensemble in the US performing the Iraqi Maqam in its traditional format. In addition, he has worked with Cecil Taylor, Mark Dresser, Gerry Hemingway, Marc Ribot, Henry Grimes, and Oliver Lake. ElSaffar has appeared on numerous recordings and has released six under his own name.
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