Mathew Pokoik - news

Today I received in the mail a copy of Vision, a behemoth of a Beijing based fashion magazine, distributed  throughout Asia, weighing in at just under 400 glossy pages. This month they did a feature on my photography of Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group, my wife’s modern dance company. Flipping through this tomb I find curious how utterly western the magazine, articles, images, and advertisements are. To see the uncropped images click here.

AVMG from And How Should I Begin ©Mathew Pokoik

Tomorrow, Sunday Sept. 9 at 2 pm, my wife’s dance company, Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group, will be performing an except from her evening length piece And How Should I Begin, as part of the DanceNow|NYC Festival. If you haven’t yet seen this piece or want to see it again please come and also check out the many presenting artists. More info can be found at the DanceNow website here, this is a great festival and an excellent way to sample what’s happening across the board in the NYC modern dance community.

The show will be at: Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th St. bet. 7th and 8th Ave. Tickets are $20 advance or $25 at the door.

The Mt Tremper Arts Party is this Sunday night, which will include the opening reception of the Interactive Landscape along with a dance and physical theater performance and DJ. It looks like we’ll have as many as 30 presenting artists across the mediums, I’m quite happy at how it has shaped up. I’ll be posting more related materials as they become available, curators statement, video from the Q&A, and party snap-shots. Hope to see you this weekend!

Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group ©Mathew Pokoik

Over the past weekend Mt Tremper Arts hosted Jonah Bokaer and dance company for a short residency and work-in-progress showing of The Invention of Minus One. It was quite a treat to have them here, apart from the fact that they are all current or past members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and some of the best technical modern dancers in the world today, they were a pleasure to talk to. Jonah is making challenging and fascinating work, both my conversations with the company and Jonah’s work will be bumping around my head for some time to come.

Holley Farmer and Rashaun Mitchell in work-in-progress The Invention of Minus One at the MTA studio ©Mathew Pokoik

Additionally Jonah’s work is close to my heart for a number of reasons:

-His work explores themes of modern media in a variety of ways, media of media and signs of signs, dancers photographing dancers with instant polaroid cameras and dancing with cameras on tripods - creating layers of the human, the digital, and media based imagery/movement. Anyone familiar with my work The Global City will understand my affinity for this type of movement based art. What I find interesting about Jonah’s work is his movement vocabulary clearly shows a strong influence of Cunningham, yet he is able to push the medium forward through the introduction of stronger subject matter than the old master would use.

-It is clear that he is looking and thinking about a variety of artistic mediums and having a dialogue with past and current artistic work. Duchamp is a clear influence as can be seen in past work such as NUDEDESENDANCE or Octave, of course Duchamp’s legacy was taken up in movement based art by Cunningham, and it’s logical Jonah would continue that legacy.

-He runs an arts center Chez Bushwick, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and is a strong advocate and activist for the arts by supporting new experimental work, artist curated events, arts community dialogue, and Chez Bushwick provides the lowest priced rehearsal space available in NYC!

A part of the 3rd annual Mt Tremper Arts Festival

The Interactive Landscape - A group photography show curated by Mathew Pokoik.

Featuring, Ian Baguskas, Aaron Diskin, Emmet Gowin, John Daido Loori, Daido Moriyama, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Matthew Porter, Susana Raab, Stephen Shore, Amy Stein, and Mark Wyse.

Opening party and Q&A at 8:30pm

Dance Performance at 7:00pm.

More information can be found on the Mt Tremper Arts web site, and will be coming to this blog soon.

Dubai, 2007, Mathew Pokoik