Michael Peters Art Opening and Performance at Bushel, March 23

DELHI — Bushel invites the public to an art opening celebrating O Kind Vel’d Sparrow, Michael Peters’ immersive sound-imaging installation at Bushel on Saturday, March 23, 4 to 7 pm. At 5 pm, Michael Peters and guest musician Al Margolis (composer and performer under the name If, Bwana) will construct a live performance using words and sounds as material in correlation with the installation. This event is free and open to all. Bushel is located at 106 Main Street, Delhi.

On view March 23–31, Peters’ installation O Kind Vel’d Sparrow features poetry, sound, art (visual poetry), films (kinetic visual poetry), and weird symbolic objects to create an immersive environment, a kind of flight simulator where discovery, mind travel, and even transcendence become possible.

Among the objects in the installation: a period cut in half with exposed gestating text, a black horse on a field of stars rearing above an orb-like door knob, cereal boxes from a dream the artist had, a “comet” tape measure, scientific meters, a big bang clock, and more—all of which rests upon a low-end drone offset by higher registers of AM radio static. Taken together, these strange elements gently congeal into a complex, ambient environment with meditative effects. The juxtapositions and congruencies of sound, image, text, objects, and ideas allow new ideas to appear, but with an improvisational logic open to the future. And what is the function of all that? Ask the artist, and you’ll get this: “Like an ecological topologist or a f’d up interior designer and/or some kind of celestial DJ, we can remix and remake life itself, ethically reshaping it within the vast bin of this very real cosmos. Earth art? Sort of, in part. Space art? In part, but only kind of. I shake my fist at The Council of Bots overseeing the Center for Genre Clarification, cursing under my breath. The Linnaean apps are glitching, and you’re missing the point.This is more of an incomplete LP—a long player, of sorts—with ethical aims of reanimating our relations to the immediate environment, the earth at large, and the vast air space about us. Maybe it’s more of a flight simulator, something akin to a flight manual with injunctive guidance systems for departures and arrivals. Or maybe even a prototype for something akin to an ethical flight school where pilots are trained to undo the perils of social and planetary distress.”

Michael Peters is the author of Vaast Bin (Calamari Press, 2007) and an array of sound, image, and text-based works. In addition to print and online journals, his work appears in poetry and visual-poetry anthologies like The Last Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics, 2012) and Resist Much/Obey Little (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017). His visual poetry has appeared in nearly 20 group shows, and is scattered in special collections such as the Sackner Archive and avant-garde libraries at Ohio State and University at Buffalo, as well as in private collections. Peters is also a member of the musical group Poem Rocket, and a label-mate of Sun Ra on Atavistic Records, the Chicago-based avant jazz and rock label. Peters has performed at NYC’s The Bowery Poetry Club, St. Marks Poetry Project, Issue Project Room, and Zinc Bar, as well as the Boston Poetry Marathon, SUNY Albany’s Art Museum, Round Lake Auditorium, and Chicago’s MCA. www.michael-peters.com.

BUSHEL is a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit, volunteer-led, mixed-use space dedicated to art, agriculture, ecology, and action. It is located at 106 Main Street in Delhi. For more information, go to www.bushelcollective.org.