Permanent Collection, South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, Indiana
Michael Lasater. Kansas City Artists Coalition, Kansas City, MO. Solo exhibition, December 13, 2013 – January 14, 2014.
South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN. Solo exhibition, March 10 - July 8, 2012.
First Place, Union Street Gallery, Chicago Heights, IL, Image, Attitude, Impression, March 12 - April 19, 2010.
Honorable Mention, Morean Arts Center, St. Petersburg, FL, September 4 - 26, 2009.
Crossing, Berlin 1927 (2008)
Single-channel HD video, stereo.
Digitized archive film, synthesized sound.
Crossing, Berlin 1927 references memory and narrative. With its multiple, time-scattered views of a young woman crossing a Berlin street just ahead of a thunderstorm, the piece also touches on the connection between film and cubism. But to me Crossing is mostly musical. One pane (middle row, second from left) plays an ostinato of frozen poses, while the other panes—voices—play against this ostinato and each other in perpetual counterpoint. Using time to hold time in place, turning time into an object, is an idea elegantly expressed by the composer György Ligeti:
I favor musical forms that are less process-like and more object-like. Music as frozen time, as an object in an imaginary space that is evoked in our imagination through music itself. Music as structure that, despite its unfolding in the flux of time, is still synchronically conceivable, simultaneously present in all its moments. To hold on to time, to suspend its disappearance, to confine it in the present moment, this is my primary goal in composition.
And – it’s interesting to me that the woman ends her run across the street looking at the camera, at us.