Katherine Liberovskaya

TAKE-OFF 

2005, 24 minutes

video: Katherine Liberovskaya 

 music: Al Margolis

Take-off originated with a musical work-in-progress that composer Margolis proposed to video artist Liberovskaya as a point of departure for a collaborative piece. Margolis's drone evoked for Liberovskaya a series of images which she shot and began to put together. From this point on, over some 12 months, both the music and video evolved in additions and substractions, at times in reaction to one another, at times on their own. The piece is thus the result of a back-and-forth dialogue between image and sound where flying machines flutter and flying creatures rumble in flickering bombinating juxtaposed layers. 

Katherine Liberovskaya is a Canadian video and media artist based in Montreal and New York. She has been working predominantly in experimental video since the late eighties. Over the years, she has produced many single-channel videos and video installation works, some of which have earned awards and mentions in Europe and North America. Her works have been presented at a wide variety of artistic venues and events around the world. She has held numerous grants and arts awards in Canada and in France where she studied media arts. In addition to her art practice she has concurrently been involved in the programming and organization of diverse media art events, notably with Studio XX in Montreal (of which she was programming coordinator from 1996-98 and president from 2001 to 2003), Espace Videographe, Montreal, Experimental Intermedia, NY (Screen Compositions 2005 & 2006). In recent years her work mainly revolves around collaborations with new music composers, notably Phill Niblock ('Babel-On', 2004, 5-channel video-audio installation, 'Painting the Painting', 2003, single-channel video, 'Topolo: de Passato a Avvenire', 2005, multiple projection & sound installation), as well as Al Margolis/IF BWANA, Margarida Garcia and David Watson. In 2003 she began exploring live video mixing, using MAX/MSP and Jitter, in improvisation with live new music/sound. Since, she has performed live video at a variety of venues in NY, Montreal and Europe with a number of music/sound artists including: o.blaat, Toshio Kajiwara, Shelley Hirsch, David Watson, Margarida Garcia, Barry Weisblat, Vortex (Satoshi Takeishi + Shoko Nagai), Mary Halvorson, Tiziana Bertoncini, Thomas Lehn, Urkuma, Angelica Castello, Micheal Delia, Antonio Della Marina, Giuseppe Ielasi, Renato Rinaldi, Martine Crispo, TV Pow, Boris Hauf, Matt Pass, Richard Geret, Gil Sanson, Gill Arno, Ben Owen, Andre Goncalves...

Al Margolis was one of the prime movers in the legendary cassette underground scene of the 1980s (between 1984 and 1991 his Sound Of Pig label released over 300 cassettes of music by the likes of Merzbow, Costes, Amy Denio, John Hudak and Jim O'Rourke) and is the eminence grise behind twenty years of music under the name If, Bwana. He is the man behind the Pogus label, as well as label manager for Deep Listening, XI Records, and Mutable Music. He has recorded and/or performed with Pauline Oliveros, Ione, Joan Osborne, Adam Bohman, Ellen Christi, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Jane Scarpantoni, Ulrich Krieger, David First, Dave Prescott, Hal McGee, Sarah Weaver, Hudson Valley Soundpainting Ensemble, and Amoeba (Raft) Boy, among others.

 A recent review of MargolisÕs work says: "Let it be declared that Al Margolis/If, Bwana is some sort of evil genius working with raw materials which are never adapted to a genre or a context, because they create one in that very moment. Those sources are radically altered up to an utterly unrecognizable state, anarchic manifestations moving in compact determination." (Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes) 

.

.