Larynx launch party: Lary 7 / Lawrence Kumpf / Maggie Lee
Montez Press Radio
New York, NY 10012
Join Blank Forms and Montez Press Radio for a launch party celebrating the release of Larynx, the first full-length retrospective of Lary 7’s idiosyncratic hybrid engineering and music practice. Beginning at 9:00 pm, Lawrence Kumpf and Lary 7 will be spinning selections ranging from dub reggae, left-field easy listening, “furniture music,” and other curios, followed by a DJ set by artist Maggie Lee. For his part, Lary has proposed a feedback-driven listening environment using a small-distance AM/FM transmitter and assorted handheld radios, open to audience participation. Other surprises are likely.
Copies of Larynx will be available to purchase. The event will be simultaneously broadcast on radio.montezpress.com. Doors to Montez Press Radio will open at 7 pm, and there will be additional broadcasted performances by the station from 7–9 pm. There will be a cash bar.
Multimedia art alchemist LARY 7 was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1956, and encouraged by his mother to mine junkyards for treasure from a young age. A former media studies student of Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, and Hollis Frampton at the city’s public university, 7 was also educated in engineering, architecture, and filmmaking. He moved to Manhattan permanently in the late 1970s, where he used his technical know-how to launch a career as a commercial art photographer, working for major galleries and downtown friends alike, and has been a fixture of New York’s experimental underground ever since. Rejecting digital technologies because of their premeditated nature, 7 uses esoteric, often precarious analog equipment and instruments for his absurd, unpredictable presentations. In addition to his solo work, 7 has collaborated with the likes of Conrad, Tom Verlaine, Swans, Jarboe, Jutta Koether, and Foetus. In 2015, Anthology Film Archives celebrated the release of Danielle de Picciotto’s documentary Not Junk Yet: The Art Of Lary 7 with a three-day retrospective of his films. He retired from commercial photography after Hurricane Sandy and remains a tenant in the same East Village building he has lived in since the mid-’80s.
MAGGIE LEE is an artist based in New York. Her work has taken an array of forms including sculpture, installation, photography, zine-making, blogging and moving image. In her diaristic videos and cross-media collage, Lee has frequently probed the emotional undercurrents and personal resonances of contemporary culture: memories of the artist’s early years in suburban New Jersey, candid scenes from New York City nightlife, and totem-like odes to the assorted mass-produced ephemera that adorns daily life. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Reena Spaulings Fine Art/House of Gaga, Los Angeles; Jenny’s, New York; Édouard Montassut, Paris; Lomex, New York; 356 Mission, Los Angeles; Real Fine Arts, New York; and LadyBug House, San Francisco. Her video Mommy is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and will be on view as part of the forthcoming exhibition Inheritance. Lee lives and works in New York