Our season theme is HOME. We will dive into the natural world, culture, and human connection, and we’re inviting you to participate all along the way! Join us on February 18 at the gorgeous Austin ISD Performing Arts Center for the centerpiece of our season. Learn more here. We would like to thank atsec information security for their generous sponsorship of Marek’s residency and our home project.
We’re so excited to celebrate Home next weekend at the gorgeous Austin ISD Performing Arts Center!
We will be blown away by ACG Artist-in-Residence, Marek Pasieczny’s big beautiful composition, called The Elements. He’ll be joined by percussion super-talent Thomas Burritt and Grammy-nominated cellist Bion Tsang, as well as a guitar orchestra of over 80 players of all ages led by Joe Williams. We’ll even have breathtaking video projections of Texas landscape by photographer Barry Stone!
This week we had the opportunity to connect with visual artist Barry Stone!
Barry got his MFA from the University of Texas and has taught photography at the International Center of Photography and the Pratt Institute in New York! He has been teaching in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University since 2007. As an artist, Barry creates his own photo books and has had his work shown internationally. He has also been represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York since 2005.
This concert is inspired by home. Home means a lot of different things to different people. Barry shared what Home means to him,
“Geographer Yi Fu Tuan has written that home is a ‘nurturing shelter…where life begins and ends.’ In this sense home is a physical place, a kind of duration, as well as something felt. I feel that rings true.”
We connected with Barry while he was at Shield Ranch making improvisational guitar field recordings and photographs for his web-based project, Porch Swing Orchestra. Barry shared,
“Also touring the property was ACG board member, Stacia, who when I said I wasn’t classically trained, said, “I know some folks that are!!” and she put me in touch with Matt and Joe. Joe met me at my show of Lost Pines at Lora Reynolds Gallery where we had a lovely conversation and floated the idea of incorporating the images into the HOME project. My daughter and I came to hear Marek play and preview some of the show and were blown away. This is going to be such an amazing and ambitious piece. I am so excited and humbled to play a part in this important world premiere.
When Marek completed the score, Joe helped me map it out. We talked about moods and pacing and I was able to test some of the imagery on the system at the gorgeous AISD PAC. I think it looks super exciting!”
In Barry’s latest book and exhibition, Lost Pines, he combined photographs taken over a 10-year span in the wake and recovery of the Bastrop County Complex Fire. Barry shared a bit about this project,
“These images serve as a kind of envelope enclosing a group of pictures I recently discovered in an old undeveloped roll of film taken of the inside of my grandad’s trailer which tragically caught fire and took his life in 2002. The work also includes polaroids rescued from the detritus my grandad made in and around his home in Magnolia, Texas. The work contains many cycles of life, the end of one life, and the return of the pine forest.
I am heavily invested in the history of photography but equally interested in exploring new avenues. The images from Lost Pines are black and white and owe much of their formal construction to 19th Century photographers like Gustave Le Gray and Carleton Watkins. In some of the images, however, I open the digital file of the photograph with a code editing program used by programmers and scramble the code of the file to create generative aberrations or glitches. These glitched works render the forest in a kind of melting burn.”
We couldn’t be more grateful to connect and collaborate with so many talented local artists. We’ll be able to see some of the images from Lost Pines at our celebratory concert on February 18! Find tickets here. Learn more about Barry Stone and his artwork here.
