SOLD OUT: Auerglass and Friends

Join us for a series of performances on and in relation to the Auerglass Organ, a two-person collaborative pump organ conceived by Tauba Auerbach and musician Cameron Mesirow (known professionally as Glasser). The Auerglass, whose title combines the artists’ names, depends on trust and coordination to play and expands upon key interdisciplinary themes and concepts from the exhibition Tauba Auerbach — S v Z. The instrument cannot be played by a single person, as each player relies on the other to pump air into their pipes. The two sides of the instrument are just shy of symmetrical — a single keyboard is divided between them in alternating notes.

On March 10 and 11, Auerbach and Mesirow will play compositions on the Auerglass; physicist Hideo Mabuchi will give a talk entitled Disjunction that deconstructs conventional oppositions, such as art versus science, in relation to Auerbach’s work; and composer and artist Meara O’Reilly and musician Olga Bell will perform vocal arrangements based on the practice of hocketing, which splits a melody across multiple parts, often in surprising ways.

Schedule

Introduction: Associate Curator of Architecture and Design Joseph Becker and Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture Jenny Gheith

I. Auerglass performance I: Tauba Auerbach and Cameron Mesirow (Glasser)

II. Disjunction talk: Hideo Mabuchi

III. Auerglass performance II

IV. Hockets for Two Voices: Meara O’Reilly and Olga Bell

V. Auerglass performance III

Speakers and Performers

Though best known for painting, New York–based artist Tauba Auerbach works in a variety of media including weaving, glass, photography, 3D printing, typeface design, book making, and musical instrument design. In 2013, they founded Diagonal Press to formalize their ongoing publishing practice.

Cameron Mesirow, known professionally as Glasser, is a recording artist based in New York. She has released two albums to critical acclaim, Ring (2010) and Interiors (2013), as well as an experimental EP Sextape (2018), which features an assemblage of people speaking about their sexual experiences over original music. In recent years she has been studying different traditions of singing to expand her own practice, such as Bulgarian choir music and Northern Indian Raga.

Hideo Mabuchi is a physicist, ceramist, and professor of applied physics at Stanford University. He wonders what it is to be a maker, researcher, scholar, and teacher all at once rather than by turns — his overarching practice explores this question in the studio, laboratory, and classroom.

Meara O’Reilly is a composer and artist focusing on perception. Her album Hockets for Two Voices was named as one of Artforum‘s best of the year for 2019. Her work has been presented at Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Hall, The Bauhaus Dessau, and as part of Björk’s Biophilia world tour.

With “grand compositional ambitions and a dynamic voice,” Olga Bell is a musician working at the “adventurous edge of pop” (New York Times). Her last release Tempo was named among the top Pop/R&B albums of 2016 by Pitchfork. Bell lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, data artist Nicholas Felton, and their two daughters.