July 29, 2016
Friday Flights
Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Jim Drain received a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. Drain was a member of Forcefield, a collective that merged music, performance, film, and installation. Forcefield was active from 1996 to 2002 and was part of the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Drain has exhibited widely in major museums and galleries across the United States and Europe. His work is in many permanent and public collections including The Whitney Museum of Art; Peres Art Museum, Miami; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Rhode Island School of Design Museum; MoCA, Los Angeles, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
It has been a while since I last performed and I decided to go to my roots, of sorts. Practicing with Forcefield was often done in unison (intentionally or not) with the GE plant across the street. The giant turbines hummed during the quiet of midnight. They pulsed and droned, indicating some activity beyond the orange glow behind its clerestory windows. Tonight’s performance utilizes sounds collected from the Museum’s subterranean halls, the ‘Getty’s guts.’ The field recordings are mixed to make a new body of sound: sounds that might otherwise be overlooked, underheard, or buried deep within the Getty campus. The speaker’s rotating platform allows the sound to wash and echo within the architecture of the building, integrating it with this new sound body. - Jim Drain
