LEGENDARY FLUXUS ARTIST ALISON KNOWLES

8:00p; $5 - $15 sliding scale donation, at the door.

Alison Knowles, a pioneering visual/book/sound artist and key participant in the legendary Fluxus group, presents an intermedia performance of her text "North Water Song," accompanied by her daughter Jessica Higgins (movement) and Joshua Selman (sound).

Knowles makes her first appearance in Seattle at 8:00 PM at the Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N (4th floor). The Good Shepp is located west of I-5, just south of 50th St. 206-789-1939.

Co-presented by Nonsequitur (206-789-1939) and Subtext Reading Series.

Born in New York in 1933, Knowles has been closely associated with Fluxus, an international group of artists concerned with blurring the boundaries between the various artistic disciplines and everyday life.

For her first appearance in Seattle, she will present "North Water Song," originally composed as a tribute to John Cage on his 75th birthday and realized as a sound work commissioned by West German Radio. A close friend and collaborator with Cage, Knowles uses chance operations to extract random fragments from a variety of texts, including her own writings as well as Thoreau's Journal, the I Ching, and other water-related publications.

This performance will include three simultaneous realizations of the score, with spoken text by Alison Knowles, movement by her daughter Jessica Higgins, and sound by Joshua Selman. Nonsequitur is especially pleased to renew our association with Ms. Knowles, having previously released her only solo CD "Frijoles Canyon" on our ¿What Next? Recordings label.

ARTIST BIO: Alison Knowles makes performances, books, poems, and visual artworks. Since the 1960s she has been a key participant in Fluxus, along with Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, and many other international artists working in/across various disciplines.

For Something Else Press she created "Notations," an anthology of graphic scores co-edited with John Cage, and "Coeurs Volants" with Marcel Duchamp. Other book-related projects have included the "Bean Rolls," a canned book that appeared in The American Century at the Whitney Museum (2000) and "The Big Book" (1967), a walk-in book with 8-foot pages; a second walk-in book, "The Book Of Bean" (1983) appeared in Venice.

Her "House of Dust" was the first computerized poetry on record, winning her a Guggenheim fellowship. In the 1970s, she was Associate Professor of Art at the newly-born California Institute of the Arts with Alan Kaprow. Since the 1980s she has worked in Italy, Germany, and Japan making multiples, unique pieces, and sound works for radio. Her only commercial solo CD, "Frijoles Canyon," was released by Nonsequitur in 1992 on its ¿What Next? label.

In 2001, she performed and exhibited her new paper/sound works at the Drawing Center in New York. Her graphic scores were exhibited and performed recently at the Kitchen in NYC, and she will perform at the Guggenheim Museum in 2009.

12-4-07 : Knowles podcast interview with Jen Graves of The Stranger.

Artist web site:
http://www.aknowles.com/

More artist info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Knowles
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/knowles/index.html

Interviews:
http://jacketmagazine.com/33/knowles-ivby-burnett.shtml http://fluxusblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/interview-with-alison-knowles-by-ruud.html
http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/