Art, music merge for 'Percussion at Peeler'

GREENCASTLE -- Art and music merge for "Percussion at Peeler," an annual event where contemporary musical performance and contemporary visual art come together to provide an enriched aesthetic experience in a nontraditional setting on the campus of DePauw University.

The 2011 edition of the event -- which is presented free of admission charge -- will take place in the lower level of the University Gallery at the Peeler Art Center on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.

This year's concert will feature solo and small group works for percussion performed by student musicians from the DePauw School of Music in conjunction with the exhibition "Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture."

The audience is encouraged to move around the space and enjoy the exhibition as well as the music.

The percussion group is led by Amy Lynn Barber, professor of music, and the exhibition is under direction of Kaytie Johnson, director and curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections.

The percussion program will consist of contemporary works that complement the artworks on view in the exhibition, providing a dynamic way of making connections between performed music and contemporary visual art.

Students selected one of the art works to use as inspiration for a group improvisation entitled, "Image Transfer: Musical Remix." The informal format gives the performances a casual feel, allowing the audience to interact with the performers on a much more intimate, engaged, level.

Solo works by American, European and Japanese composers in a variety of styles are also on the program. 

Guests are invited to a reception in the lobby immediately following the performance. 

About the Exhibition: 

"Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture" is an exhibition that investigates the resurgence of the appropriation, recuperation, and repurposing of extant photographic imagery in recent art.

Artists, as both producers and consumers in today's vast image economy, freely adopt and adapt materials from myriad sources. Images culled from the Internet, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, television, films, personal and public archives, studio walls, and other works of art are all fair game.

Image Transfer brings together artists who divert commonplace, even ubiquitous, visual materials into new territories of formal and idiomatic expression.

The exhibition proposes that these artists mark the progression of intuitive practices that are thoroughly at ease with today's hyper-fluid circulation of images.

In our digital age of fair use and open source, these attitudes demonstrate how far traditional notions of the authority and primacy of source materials have shifted toward a fluent rethinking of the way we value and interact with images. 

Concentrating on a dozen artists, Image Transfer includes photography, painting, drawing, collage, projection, and installation.

Growing out of the legacies of Pop, Conceptual Art, the Pictures Generation, experimental film, and avant-garde design, the exhibiting artists employ tactics of transferring, accumulating, and recombining existing images to construct new images, objects, and situations.

Notably, the techniques of cut-and-paste, re-photography, double exposure, and other object-oriented studio practices commingle with photocopying, scanning, and the commands of editing software.

Artists who work across these multiple platforms reflect a systemic evolution that broadly parallels aspects of DJ culture, television and film production, and the DIY movement.

The proliferating phenomena of remixes, mash-ups, montage, and collage (and the technologies that enable them) inform an alternative perspective for contemplating developments in visual art that resonate with wide-ranging cultural trends.

The exhibition opens Tuesday and continues through May 6.