Ooga Booga is an innovative storefront shop that features alternative objects, design, fashion, artist books and editions, as well as records and visual projects by musicians. Under the direction of owner Wendy Yao, the store presents objects with a disregard for conventional boundaries, with a punk-inspired irreverence, showing that artists and ideas in any discipline can be engaged in the same aesthetic discussion. For Friday Flights, Yao has invited a group of artists and musicians who, each in their own way, deals with performance—one of the deepest connections between music and the visual arts.
Avey Tare of the renowned sound innovators Animal Collective, teams up with Black Dice’s Bjorn Copeland for an sound installation and performance. Avey Tare, whose practice with Animal Collective spans ten studio albums that pushed electronic music into wholly new, kaleidoscopic territories, isn’t new to the museum context—he co-staged an environmental sonic experience inside New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2010. Bjorn Copeland’s distorted noise-rock with Black Dice has also thrived in the art context, appearing in an installation by artist Peter Coffin at Andrew Kreps Gallery, composing tracks for painter Richard Phillips, and performing in art venues like the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Andy Warhol Museum, and more.
Nguzunguzu are an integral force within the L.A.-based Fade To Mind collective, specializing in piecing together disparate club elements into a peculiar sound that is all at once tough, emotive, sexy, and scary. Nguzunguzu’s sets are a dizzying combination of digging, blending, and seamless re-contextualization. Never content to stay in one place for too long, Nguzunguzu’s journeys may take you around the weirder edges of chart R&B and hip-hop, Baltimore club, globetrotting urban pop, eski, zouk, footwork, kizomba, or kuduro, before splintering into genres unknown.
MAL PAIS is a collaboration between artists M. Cay Castagnetto and MPA conceived nine months ago and born today as a rant-band. From the lookout point between four tracks looping separate circles, MAL PAIS’s performance shadows the work of Henry Hills, Ester Ferrer, Libby Howes of the Wooster Group, and Yvonne Rainer.
Alexa Weir, Flora Wiegmann, Rikki Rothenberg, and Busy Gangnes are all Los Angeles-based dancers who, individually and collectively, bring dance to unique environments such as galleries, outdoor spaces, malls, and music venues. They will perform a three-hour structured improvisational score using found movement and borrowed choreography. The piece travels throughout the museum.
Wendy Yao
