Sophie Kahn and Lisa Parra at the Big Screen Plaza

Posted by / June 4th, 2011 / No responses

As part of LISA’s partnership with the Big Screen Plaza, we will be showing one of Sophie Kahn and Lisa Parra‘s works during the months of June and July on the Big Screen at the Eventi Hotel at 30th and 6th in Manhattan.  We are excited that Sophie and Lisa are are working with us for this project!

Artists’ Bios as of June 3, 2011:
Sophie Kahn was born in London in 1980. She studied Fine Art and Art History at Goldsmiths College, London, and Spatial Information Architecture at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. Current projects include large-scale LIDAR landscapes, sculptural portraits created with a 3d laser scanner, and digital paper sculpture made using origami software. Sophie has presented individual and group exhibitions at artist-run, public and commercial spaces in Melbourne, Sydney, Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, Washington DC and London. Her work is held in private collections in Australia, Europe and the United States. Sophie lives and works in New York City, where she teaches as a Visiting Associate Professor in Digital Arts at Pratt Institute.

Lisa Parra is a New York/Madrid based choreographer and performer. She received a Bachelors degree in Dance from the University of California at Irvine, Masters degree in Dance/Movement Therapy from the University of California at Los Angeles, and a Certification in Movement Analysis from the Laban Institute in New York City. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally: at New York’s Dixon Place, the Oasis Festival at Chashama, the Williamsburg Art Nexus, the D.U.M.B.O and the Cool New York Dance Festival; in San Francisco at the West Wave Dance Festival; in Spain at the Marató Festival in Barcelona, and more recently at Performática Dance Festival in Puebla, Mexico. She has also has performed and collaborated in works by Claire Porter/Portables. Lisa currently lives in Madrid, Spain.

Here is a statement about the piece that will be shown:

Body/Traces by Sophie Kahn and Lisa Parra, sound by Sawako Kato, is a stop-motion 3d digital animation, presented as a single-channel video installation. This project began with Lisa documenting weekly movement phrases in Madrid.  These video sequences were then sent to Sophie in New York, where she scanned dancer Tina Vasquez as she re-enacted the movement using a DIY 3D laser scanner. Sophie processed and rendered the 1000 3d scans in 3D Studio Max.  Lisa then took these renders and reconstructed the choreography by animating the image sequences in Final Cut Pro. There they became movement once again, but in a much altered form.  The results are an imperfect document of the traces left by the dancer’s body in space; an abstracted record of the motion of the body as it moves through space and time.

Body/Traces has been screened at the Japan Media Arts Festival (where it was a jury recommended work), DANSCAMDANSE, the International Video Dance Festival of Burgundy, DNA and EMPAC.

Body/Traces was an EMPAC Dance Movies Commission, supported by the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media & Performing Arts – Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.

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June’s Leaders in Software and Art choices (a 60-min. loop that plays twice through in a two hour period), including works by Asya Reznikov, Matthew Richard, Nell Breyer, Sophie Kahn and Lisa Parra, Benton-C Bainbridge and Brooke Broussard, and Deborah Johnson, will show on the Big Screen at the following times (schedule subject to change.  Please check schedule at http://bigscreenplaza.com before attending).

6/7 — 9AM-11AM
6/9/11 — 12PM-2PM, 8PM-10PM
6/21 — 9-11AM
6/22 — 7-9PM
6/23 — 12-2PM  & 8-10PM