Friday 5th February
6pm

By Marcus Jackson
Sound Artist in Residence
with guest artists Elliot Vaughan and Glen Downie

Toi Poneke Gallery

Marcus Jackson will be joined in performance by Elliot Vaughan and Glen Downie to close his exhibition Slime Inheritance. Drawing on and responding to the narrative of the installation, they will perform superimpositions of a series of works created during the residency period. These works focus on restraint in sound, creating new tunings for the space and exploring the recorder as an extended instrument. The result is a gooey, nostalgic, minimal and economical sonic space. 

Marcus Jackson is the 2020 Sound Artist in Residence .
Kindly supported by Te Kōkī NZ School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington and Toi Pōneke Arts Centre.

Artist’s Biographies

Marcus Jackson (BMus Hons, 2017, VUW; MMus, 2019, VUW) is an artist and composer based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. He is interested in navigating the links between physical gesture and sound production, looking in particular at how gesture illuminates the culture from which it emerges. He works in a variety of forms including performance, composition, installation, and text.

Glen Downie is a Wellington based composer who holds a Master of Musical Arts from Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music. He's participated in numerous festivals & workshops including the 2016 Palendriai International Composers workshop and the 2017 ['tactus] composer forum Belgium, working with the Brussels Philharmonic & Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles. He has been resident composer with the NZSO National Youth Orchestra (2019) and written for the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra, Stroma, and many other ensembles and soloists.

Also an active improviser on the saxophone, he plays with Pyramid Lake (Rob Thorne, Simon Eastwood & Dexter Stanley-Tauvao), has worked with the Arthur Street Loft Orchestra, Jeff Henderson, and others, and is increasingly interested in leading medium-large ensembles in guided improvisations. He works closely with many artist run initiatives such as the SMP Ensemble and the Pyramid Club.

Elliot Vaughan is an experimental composer, performer and artist based in Pōneke. For fifteen years he lived in Vancouver, where he completed a BFA at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts before freelancing as a composer, viola player and artistic collaborator. His career there extended from experimental theatre (Leaky Heaven, Robert Leveroos/Macromatter, Leaky Heaven) to pop music (Jay Malinowski, David Ward, The End Tree) to music for dance (Rob Kitsos, Julie Lebel/Foolish Operations, Desiree Dunbar/Dezza Dance) to contemporary classical composition.

Returning to Aotearoa in 2018 to earn his MMus at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music, Elliot has begun to establish himself here as a creator-performer.
His careful blend of New Music and performance art led to 2019’s evening-length Fish in Pink Gelatine (performed installations and staged concert at Adam Art Gallery , BATS), NZDL2k11 Sports Day (public intervention of invented games on Cuba Street) and the absurd first instalment of What are the dead to us in out better fortune? (performative report on ‘this day in history’, Minter at Play_Station gallery).

Then came 2020's sweaty, messy Surreal Multiverse(a concert in collaboration with Tristan Carter and Arthur Street Loft Orchestra). His practice focusses on co-creative projects, the magic of acoustics, and exploring the construct of the performance space.