An exhibition of eight video artworks,
each of which subjects a particular song to a wild but discerning transformation.Lone orchestra
anti-cool in collaboration with Duchess Says
Japan/Canada, single channel video (2008)
Working in collaboration with Montreal band Duchess Says, anti-cool creates an auto-didactic remix of their song Ccut up. One after another the band's members, A-Claude, Ismael, Phil and Simon Says, are all replaced by anti-cool whose power-suited rendition of the song proves no less mesmerizing than the original. Taking over on guitar, drums, keyboards and vocals, she infuses the song with a frantic enthusiasm that makes it entirely her own.
Lone orchestra is a record, not only a song as it appears in alternate universes, but also of the kind of apprenticeship that can evolve within musical communities where imitation and appropriation are part of the DNA of friendship. For anti-cool, the blurring of boundaries between individuals through sweet imitation and mirror image offers a chance to learn, understand and grow close. Through a series of such substitution projects she has become a newspaper salesman, waitress, wormer, language teacher and 'ladyfisherman'.
anti-cool (Japan) is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in performance and installation art. She was born in Kanagawa, Japan and has been performing internationally since participating in NIPAF ‘00 at Kid Ailack Art Hall in Tokyo, in 2000. Exhibitions of her work have taken place at the Battersea Arts Center (London, UK), Festival of Live Art (Glasgow), International Performance Festival (Odense, Denmark), Plattform Raum fur Kunst (Vienna), Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), CAFKA (Kitchener, Ontario) and Dare-Dare (Montreal).
Anti-Cool onlinewww.artgene.co.uk/artist.php?i=15www.kuspace.org/map_of_meanings_pt_engl.htm