Marina Rosenfeld Overview

Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in New York City. Her work has deployed both musical and visual media, including a noted series of large-scale performance works; multichannel sound installation; video; photography and hybrid forms drawing on these. While... [more]

Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in New York City. Her work has deployed both musical and visual media, including a noted series of large-scale performance works; multichannel sound installation; video; photography and hybrid forms drawing on these. While still a student, in 1994 she created the “Sheer Frost Orchestra”, a performance realized by 17 women on floor-bound electric guitars, deploying nail-polish bottles as sensitive and magical sound-producing implements. Later “orchestras”, including the performances “Emotional Orchestra” (Deitch Projects, New York, Tate Modern, London), and “WHITE LINES” (Wien Modern, British School at Rome, Taktlos Bern, Weld/Stockholm), have continued to evolve around the ideas first considered in these works, culminating, most recently, with “Teenage Lontano”, a work for 34-voice teenaged choir and “phonographic” (rotating) speaker installation. “Teenage Lontano” was premiered in the vast Drill Hall space of the Park Avenue Armory in New York as part of the Whitney Biennial 2008, about which critc Jerry Saltz wrote, “Watching this piece, I felt the opening of a portal between a failed utopian past and the possibility that the more real present is already something to love. I was transported.” It will next be performed in Amsterdam as part of the Holland Festival in June 2009. As an improviser, Rosenfeld has developed a distinctive practice playing turntables and her own custom dub plates (‘acetate records’), which are imprinted with original, fragmentary sound created in the studio to be remixed, manipulated, and otherwise transformed live, and performs frequently in Europe and North America, both solo and with many contemporary musicians, including Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, Lee Ranaldo, george Lewis, Kaffe Matthews, Nels Cline, Zeena Parkins, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide, Philip Jeck, Kim Gordon, Christof Kurzmann, Alan Licht, Dieb 13, Raz Mesinai, Anthony Coleman, and many others. She’s also brought her unique sensibility to sound installations for speaker arrays of various sizes and formats, and music composition-related works using video and photography, especially lenticular or 3D photography in constellations of turntables, photos and original LPs (“fragment opera”). Rosenfeld’s work has appeared in a wide variety of contexts including the Whitney Museum (incuding the 2008 and the 2002 Whitney Biennials and the 2001 survey “Bitstreams”), the Tate Modern, the Stedelijk Museum (upcoming in June 2009), Artists Space, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; a public-art project for Creative Time; and festivals in North American and Europe including Wein Modern, Donaueschingen, the Holland Festival, Ars Electronica, Musikprotokoll, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, Ars Electronica, Electronic Music Foundations's Ear to the Earth, and Los Angeles' Center for Experiments in Information, Art and Tecnhology, among others. Rosenfeld’s performed frequently with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; with the art-band “Text of Light”; with Sonic Youth during their “Good-bye Twentieth Century” tour; and was part of the London Musicians Collectives’ “Turntable Hell” project. She’s been included in numerous surveys of digital culture / sound-art / experimental music including “Bitstreams” (Whitney Museum), “Her Noise” (Electra), “Music / Video” (Bronx Museum & Strassbourg Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain), “Electronic Music Archive” (Kunsthalle St. Gallen), and “New Sounds New York” (The Kitchen). Commissioned works include "bone canopy/tine palace" for The Kitchen House Blend Ensemble; "Cephissus landscape", a 16-channel public installation for the reopening of New York’s Winter Garden in September 2002; “Delusional Situation” and “Teenage Lontano” for Whitney Biennials 02 and 09, respectively; “anti-Warhol movement” for New York's Diapason Gallery for Sound and Intermedia; and “Rings/Black Circles” for the New York New Music Ensemble. Rosenfeld’s recordings include: Plastic Materials (forthcoming 2009 on Room 40) Sour Mash (forthcoming 2009 on Innova), a collaboration with George Lewis theforestthegardenthesea: music from fragment opera (1999, Charhizma / Vienna), featuring Alan Licht, David Galbraith and others; co-produced by Mayo Thompson (Red Krayola) the sheer frost orchestra: hop, drop, drone, slide, scratch and A for anything (2001, Charhizma / Vienna), featuring Ikue Mori, Barbara Ess, Kaffe Matthews, Chiara Giovando, and many others joy of fear (2006, Softl/Cologne), with cellist Okkyung Lee Other recording projects include “DJTrio” with Christian Marclay and Toshio Kajiawara (Asphodel, San Francisco); and “a water’s wake,” with drummer Tim Barnes and Toshio Kajiwara (Quakebasket, NY). Performers in Marina’s Sheer Frost and Emotional Orchestras have been too numerous to list, but include Laurie Anderson, Kembra Pfahler (aka 'Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black'), Kaffe Matthews, o.blaat, Okkyung Lee, Chiara Giovando, 'Honeychild', Jutta Koether, Josephine Meckseper, Jacqueline Humphries, Jennifer Baron, and many others. Rosenfeld’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Leonardo, the LA Weekly and in John Zorn’s “Arcana 2: Musicians on Music” (Tzadik, 2007). She’s been a member of the faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College since 2003, and Co-Chair of the department of Music/Sound since 2007. [show less]