Check out the latest project by JJ Stevens, the sonic half of Potter Belmar Labs. PBL just returned from a whirlwind West Coast tour so check it out!!

The post card image reminds me of Hesse’s “Metronomic Irregularity” and JJS says he makes strange lightning bolts from shag carpet, sounds good…
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New sculpture installation by Jason Jay Stevens
at Joan Grona Gallery, in San Antonio,
June 26 through August 16, 2008

WHO: Jason Jay Stevens, San Antonio-based installation artist,
exhibit designer & live cinema performer
WHAT: Mixed media sculpture installation, titled:
“The Theoretical Fixed Point in the Turbulent Aeviternity
(Come You Lost Atoms to Your Center Draw)”
WHEN: June 26 through August 16, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 26, 6-9pm
WHERE: Joan Grona Gallery, 112 Blue Star
San Antonio, Texas 78204

San Antonio-based artist, Jason Jay Stevens, presents his latest sculpture installation at Joan Grona Gallery, at the Blue Star Arts Complex, during San Antonio Contemporary Art Month.
The show opens with a reception on Thursday, June 26th, from 6 until 9pm, and runs through August 16th.
Mr. Stevens’ immersive installations envelope and transport viewers, mixing poetry and science to alter space and time. The work is often interactive, multimedia, and always multi-layered and complex.
For “The Theoretical Fixed Point in the Turbulent Aeviternity (Come You Lost Atoms to Your Center Draw),” Stevens has combined work in fabric, wood, electronics, light, musical objects, and strange lightning bolts made from black shag carpet. The result might be a scene from an alternate dimension.
At one end of the gallery, a giant light box occasionally flashes the question, “Did you feel that?” referring to a mysterious event that makes the viewer question their sensitivity. Throughout the room, flying bed sheets imitate a firmament of angels, and flecks of gold outline otherwise invisible magnetic fields.

About the title of the exhibition:
Part of the title comes from an epic Sufi poem, “The Conference of Birds,” by the 12th Century poet, Farid ud-Din Attar.
Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wander’d into Darkness wide
Return and back into your Sun subside.
The main title intends to conjure the capturing a moment in a state of hyper-reality, to bring into harmony concepts both scientific and spiritual.
Paraphrasing Aristotle, all things are in motion at all times. Every speck vibrates. Every galactic cloud is turbulent. You perceive the falling of a book, from table to floor, only as a motion relative to your own; because, remember, that you too, are always in motion. A fixed point can only be the Eye of God. “Whole simultaneous” and “interminable” says St. Aquinas.
From the Catholic religion comes the notion of an alternative temporal reality, Aeviternity, a place outside but integral to our plane of existence, lying between the fleet cosmos of human perception and the infinite dimensionlessness of eternity. This is the realm of angels, who neither suffer the passing of time as mortals, nor share in the omnipresence of gods.

About Jason Jay Stevens:
Jason Jay Stevens is an installation artist, museum exhibit designer, and, as a member of the group, Potter-Belmar Labs, a live cinema performer.
Stevens’ sculpture and installations have exhibited around the United States, Canada, and abroad. His work includes installation, sound art, and interactive devices. “Eight Gestures in Airborne Rope + Embellishments,” an installation of light boxes and works of fabric and paint, debuted at Blue Star Contemporary Art Center during San Antonio’s Contemporary Arts Month, in July of 2007.
In 2005, Stevens designed the permanent installation of the Light & Optics Gallery at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum in Michigan. The exhibition includes over a dozen interactives and countless effects in a very unique gallery environment.
Stevens and partner, Leslie Raymond, are multimedia collaborators, Potter-Belmar Labs, whose work includes live cinema performances in which the artists mix audio and video live. Their performances are an engrossing mix of sampled and original media, and often audience participatory. In May 2008, the duo toured the United States West Coast, performing at such venues as Other Cinema in San Francisco, and Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles.

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