Artist Talk: Raven Chacon
Thursday, October 4, 2018 | 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m
Room 4350 – SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 W. Hastings, Vancouver V6B 1H4
FREE
Please join us for an artist talk by composer and artist Raven Chacon. All are welcome.
Chacon is in Vancouver to participate in Vancouver New Music's VNM 2018 Festival: Quartetti - a festival of string quartets, which features works by Chacon produced with participants from his Native American Composer Apprentice Project as well as local Indigenous youth. Deep Blue (255 E 2nd Ave, Vancouver) is also presenting a night of noise with Raven Chacon and Mass Marriage on Wednesday, October 3 at 8 PM.
Bio
Originally from the Navajo Nation, Raven Chacon, born in 1977, is a composer of chamber music, a performer of experimental noise music, and an installation artist. He performs regularly as a solo artist as well as with numerous ensembles in the Southwest and beyond. He is also a member of the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity, with whom he recently premiered the 2-mile long land art/border intervention, Repellent Fence.
Chacon's work explores sounds of acoustic handmade instruments overdriven through electric systems and the direct and indirect audio feedback responses from their interactions. Current and recent collaborators include Laura Ortman, ETHEL String Quartet, Bob Bellerue, John Dieterich, OVO, William Fowler Collins, Ruby Kato Attwood, Jeremy Barnes, Chatter Ensemble, Robert Henke, and The Living Earth Show.
As an educator, Chacon has served as composer-in-residence for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP), teaching string quartet composition to hundreds of American Indian high-school students living on reservations in the Southwest U.S. Under his instruction, this project was awarded the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in 2011.
He has a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, where he was a student of James Tenney, Michael Pisaro, and Wadada Leo Smith. He has served on the Music and Native American Studies faculties at the University of New Mexico and as a visiting artist in the New Media Art & Performance program at Long Island University. Chacon has presented his work in different contexts at Vancouver Art Gallery, ABC No Rio, REDCAT, Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center, among other traditional and non-traditional venues.
spiderwebsinthesky.com
newmusic.org/quartetti2108
deepbluestudios.org