Erika M. Anderson (EMA) and Tabitha Nikolai
Portland, OR and New Orleans, LA
Memory as a Rock Out of Reach
Access notes: CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) will be provided for the Sept. 12th performance.
DESCRIPTION
Amidst a melodic power drone soundscape of modular synth, guitar, songs, and spoken word, Erika M. Anderson (also known as EMA) returns to the stage as a storyteller. Memory remixes the imagery that defined her childhood femininity: bikini babes, Saturday morning cartoons, and the eroticized overlap between them. Wielding video game technologies originally designed for making the latest first-person-shooter, Tabitha Nikolai subverts them into the creation of surreal psycho-geographies. Together, Anderson and Nikolai play off each other, exploring sonic and visual dreamscapes projected in real time. Synth noise, commercial detritus, and degraded three-dimensional scans evoke a haunted feeling of memory and decay. The resulting genre-defying duet is at once humorous, disquieting, and hopeful. Memory as a Rock Out of Reach is a lush collage of ‘80s excess and the resulting ruination that seeks a path away from the limits of binaries and American individualism.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Erika M. Anderson is a new media artist who has been part of the West Coast experimental music scene for two decades. She grew up on the jukeboxes of South Dakota but got noise-pilled by Cali, where she formed her first touring bands and taught herself how to make records. Her signature sound reflects those influences, pairing electronic synth drones with guitar and voice. Anderson has created cross-genre works involving sound, storytelling, virtual reality, and video game technologies, but is most well known for albums released under the name EMA, which have been widely acclaimed and covered by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian, among others. Anderson has toured extensively, working her way up from warehouse shows to festivals and arenas. Her hybrid performance pieces have taken place at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; Barbican Centre, London, UK; and the New Museum, New York, NY. Anderson currently lives in Portland, OR.
Tabitha Nikolai is a visual artist and educator who uses video games, installation, and writing to study life under the visceral and disorienting onslaught of mass virtuality. Currently based in New Orleans, LA, she grew up in Utah, and is forever influenced by her experiences there. Her work orbits themes of gender, isolation, futurism, and fantasy, often with a dark and humorous twist. With a long history of running DIY spaces, Nikolai believes deeply in the lifesaving power of community-organized scenes. Her work has been shown internationally at venues including the Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; and apexart, New York, NY. Nikolai’s video games have been covered by The New York Times, VICE, and Art in America, and in academic outlets including the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds.