Leah Singer & Lee Ranaldo
Yesterday Was A Year Ago / I Don’t Want a Future, I Want a Present
Audio/Visual Exhibition at Texas A&M University, Dord Fitz Formal Gallery, Canyon, TX
March 29 – April 24, 2021

A tree, a building, a discarded couch, a graffitied truck, the back of
someone’s head, a window display, a cloud, a bird, a stop sign.

A car horn, loud music, a dropped spoon, someone chanting, the sound
of a bell, some clapping, an alarm.

Images and Sounds
March 2020 – March 2021

“Singer’s and Ranaldo’s project is a visual and audio survey of the last year. While the elephant in the room in the coronavirus pandemic, this show is not about that nor the other world shaking events. Rather, it is a reminder that no matter how crazy life gets that there still are beautiful moments, and this exhibition is a collection of these moments.” –curator Jon Revett

The exhibition utilized 8 projectors and 4 monitors, all independent loops of audio and video, and was culled from recordings and images gathered between March 2020 and March 2021, roughly tracing the pandemic year. Images and sounds cycled and returned, always in different combinations. Anchored by an almost static ‘Japanese Snow Window”, two screens were presented as a side-by-side diptych, four others overlapped on the longest wall in the gallery. One screen exhibited mostly performance-based footage, including images of Singer+Ranaldo’s ‘Contre Jour’ performance piece, with hanging, swinging guitar/pendulum.

The show went thru three experimental iterations: the initial version was a ‘formal’ presentation of the material, the second version was expanded to include a more generous selection of audio and video material, while ‘version 3.0’ was restricted to a minimal set of files, where the monitors held rapid-fire random headline poems-in-the-making, while the projectors had much more visual overlap, sequences often playing simultaneously, out of sync, on multiple screens at once. The volume level went up considerably for v3.0, with piano, electric guitar, brass bowls and bells filling the gallery, the most active, cacaphonous version of the exhibition.

Singer and Ranaldo would normally expand an exhibition like this further, with a live performance in the gallery space, but this was not possible under current restrictions. A pair of gallery talks was done remotely via Zoom, one for students and one for the general public.

Texas web-magazine Glasstire’s Five Minute Tour video of the installation:

original Glasstire link: https://glasstire.com/2021/04/22/five-minute-tours-leah-singer-and-lee-ranaldo-at-west-texas-am-university-canyon/

Leah Singer and Lee Ranaldo have collaborated on live music and video installations and performances for three decades, performing worldwide at film festivals, concert halls, clubs and museums. Recent live performances have been large scale, multi-projection sound+light events with suspended electric guitar phenomena that challenge the usual performer/audience relationship. They live and work in New York City.

Leah Singer is a multi-disciplined artist working in photography, video, publishing, and printmaking. She is a writer and co-editor of Apartamento magazine, an international art and design magazine.Canadian born, she lives in New York where she is currently working on her masters degree in museum studies.

Lee Ranaldo, musician, visual artist, and writer, co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981, and has been active worldwide for 40 years as composer, performer and producer; also exhibiting visual art and publishing several books of journals, poetry and writings on music. New solo acoustic instrumental composition In Virus Times will be released Spring 2021 on Mute Records. His LP Names of North End Women was released in February 2020 on Mute.

Curator Jon Revett is an artist and educator living and working in Canyon, Tx. Born in Germany and spending his formative years in Austin, he then moved to the Texas Panhandle. There he experienced his creative genesis on a trip to Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp, an earthwork that he has now spent 25 years investigating. Revett completed residencies at Slade College of Art in London, Panik Studios in Mexico City, and at Mariposa Eco-Village just outside Amarillo. He is currently the Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing and Director of the Art Program at West Texas A&M University.

A quick pan of the show, version 3.0:

version 1.0, opening day, time lapse view: