Weekly Lemon

The mission of the Easy Lemon loft has always been to provide a service to the community; a place where folks could come to get a regular dose of culture and inspiration.  In the same way that community members visit the bakery, café, and (soon) wine shop here on Main St. they could also stop by our loft and soak up a short performance or an art presentation that could easily fit into their daily schedule.

To realize this mission, we will now be open weekly, every Wednesday  night from 8:00-8:30, during which I will be performing a spontaneous improvisation.  I will often use my piano, but any instrument or object is up for grabs, and you may be surprised by what you hear from week to week.   The performances will last between 20-30 minutes, and as usual it’s B.Y.O.B + $5 donation.  We’d love to see you here, and this is a completely laid-back environment in which there is no musical knowledge necessary; only open minds and ears!

CageFest 2012

In lieu of an Easy Lemon loft show this month, we’d like to invite you to come out to CageFest! at Barking Legs Theater in Chattanooga.  This will be a truly magical night!

Along with 5 other composers, my new piece will be premiered with dancers. Although my piece utilizes the piano, I have lately moved away from writing pieces for an instrument, and I am writing instead for the performer. This represents a ideological shift that has taken place in my work this year, one of utilizing not just the performer’s ability to manipulate a musical instrument, but the performer’s ability to use his/her entire body to create sound. “Piti piti n a rive” is a defining example of this new way of writing for me, the first to attack it full tilt. You could say that this piece is my manifesto on my new style of composition, and the thesis is: ‘Pay attention to the pianist, not the piano!

 

live recording of “Composition for Two Performers”

Back in February, we launched the Easy Lemon loft shows with a performance of my “Composition for Two Performers”.
This piece was not only a game-changer for me personally in my shift toward materiality and writing for the total body of a specific performer, but it also set the precedent for the kind of work that we intend to present at our loft.  Since then, the subsequent shows have stayed right on the mark with Roche’s surprising “happening”, and Buffington’s impressive scans and animation.  We can’t wait for the next show, which looks like it will happen in June.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here’s the live recording of my composition from the Feb show:

Ron Buffington, tonight at Easy Lemon!

Tonight at 8pm, Ron Buffington opens his 4-day Easy Lemon residency.  His scans will be hung on our walls and he will be on hand to do nightly presentations about his work along with demonstrations of his process.

Ron Buffington is a UC Foundation Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Buffington has been recognized for outstanding teaching through a University of Tennessee National Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher Award (2002) and a UTC College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award (1996).

Buffington has shown his paintings and prints internationally, including exhibitions in New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Lahti, Finland. Buffington’s work is included in numerous collections, including the BASF Corporation, the Museum of American Art (of the Smithsonian Institute), and Richard Polsky, author of I Bought Andy Warhol. Buffington’s work was published in New American Paintings in July 2000, where it was singled out by the editor Steven Zevitas, who said: “Ron Buffington’s abstractions operate somewhere between [the narrative and the non-representational]; while their formal structure ostensibly links them to the tradition of modernist abstract painting, they are ultimately grounded in the artist’s desire to make abstraction more accessible. That is to say, they are more about an imminent, rather than transcendent, experience. One might think of Buffington as a narrative painter in that his work presents the ‘story’ of its own creation.”

Another peek at Ron Buffington’s processes

Ron Buffington, scanning

Ron’s Artist’s Statement

Picture a young Jacques Lacan on a fishing trip. His face is illuminated by the reflected light from a discarded sardine tin floating in the sea. He squints. One of his companions, Petit-Jean, notices and asks Lacan: “You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!” This wisecrack prompts laughter, and Lacan is anything but invisible. He is conspicuous, exposed to view; he is written by the sun; he is, in a word, photo-graphed. Understandably, he draws the opposite conclusion regarding the gaze. “The picture is in my eye,” Lacan would write years later, “but me, I am also in the picture.”

As a painter my engagement with the medium of photography is rudimentary. After all, the scanograph is laughably simplistic, the 21^st century equivalent of the photogram. If the optical scanner holds my attention, it is because it promises a pure, straightforward visibility. It simply registers visual data, all over and without bias; one is tempted to say that it sees as if it cannot be seen. Of course, this does not mean that the scanner produces evidence of the spectacle played out before it. Tragically it cannot fulfill its promise, as each pass sets a new stage upon which the viewer’s desire will disorganize the view and the work of art will throw up its camouflage.

Four days until Ron Buffington’s Opening!

 

On Wednesday, March 7th, 8:00 pm, conceptual artist Ron Buffington opens his Easy Lemon residency at our loft on 1440 Adams St.
I can’t say enough about how beautiful this work is, and the processes are equally as intricate, ephemeral, and fascinating.  Over the next few days, I will be exploring Ron’s processes in his studio and posting updates on this blog as he prepares for his  opening.

Stay posted for media and updates daily!

March 7-10
8:00 pm nightly
$5 + B.Y.O.B.
1440 Adams St. (left entrance)
Chattanooga, TN

Great review in TinyBoot Blog

“‘Listen, are you coming over or what!?  I don’t have time to just sit here and blabber on about plans that we made and never stick to.”
“[So and so] set up camp…to feed and water the local population of gopher cubs,”
“1-2-3-4-5-6-7,”
“yellow is tragedy, blue is redemption.”
“These were just a few of the words spoken eloquently, yelled with conviction, chanted in a whisper while Dan’s cymbals crashed and sizzled, Aaron’s guitar sang and screamed, and Tim’s prepared piano clinked and boomed in the center of the barely-lit room… Easy Lemon is a series of come-one-come-all events centered around independent film screenings, art premiers, on-the-edge musical expression, and pretty much anything that encourages the stretching of our brain’s comfortable boundaries…”

Read more here

Rebecca Furiosa Trailer

Feb 10 Aaron Roche’s ‘Happening’ at the Easy Lemon loft