Role: Creative Producer/ Projectionist

Client: Jean Appolon Expressions; Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation

Year: 2017-Present

Reanimating the work of a pioneering avant-garde media artist for contemporary audiences

 PROBLEM

Aldo Tambellini was a friend and pioneering avant-garde multi-media artist who passed away at the age of 90 in November, 2020 without the recognition he deserved. He was a prolific sculptor, painter, poet, and video artist whose artwork focused on black in both the physical and political dimensions. Tambellini worked at the bleeding edge of artistic consciousness, becoming the first to pioneer numerous artistic practices. For example, his painting The Echo marks the transition from traditional painting to media art as the shadow cast from a strobe inverts black and white on the canvas. In 1974, Tambellini's work on "The Medium is the Medium" at WGBH marked the first time video art was broadcast on TV. And in his later work with technicians at MIT and Bell Laboratories, he became the first person to send images electronically via "slow scan" technology. While many of his contemporaries have become well-known, Tambellini is not always included in the canon of artists who bridged abstract expressionism with media art, and his archive was left to his partner and friends to ensure that his memory and life’s work could continue to inspire future generations.

SOLUTION

Starting in 2016 I began working with Aldo and his partner, Anna Salamone, to catalogue his artwork and to envision ways that his work could be reanimated and made relevant for people today. In February 2020, after his passing, and before his studio was packed up and shipped to the archive's new headquarters in Connecticut, I invited Val Jeanty (Afro-Electronica DJ), and dancers from Jean Appolon Expressions (including Appolon), to an experimental performance in response to his artwork. That initial experience was electric as we all become immersed in Tambellini’s consciousness of black. 

When Appolon was invited to stage a one-night production at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, he decided to feature a performance inspired by that initial improvisational experience. Using Isadora, a live animation software that adapts visual art to the stage, I created live animations of Tambellini’s early projection artwork called Lumagrams.

OUTCOME

• Black is Black has been performed at the Intitute of Contemporary Art, The Yard on Martha’s Vineyard, and Trinity College

• The lack of rehearsal space in Boston to support the development of this work has informed the design and build-out of the new JAE Dance Center which is being constructed to house a 40’ long projection wall for future iterations of this piece – and to become an incubator for new works that are inspired by Tambellini’s focus on creating simultaneous light, sound, and movement experiences.