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Baker's Dozen

Absorbing The Light Of The African American Avant-Garde: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe's Baker’s Dozen
Stewart Smith , February 2nd, 2022 09:48

In an epic Baker’s Dozen, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe lets Stewart Smith into the secrets of his Candyman soundtrack, and celebrates Black excellence from Don Cherry to Moor Mother, Olly W. Wilson to Pamela Z

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INFINITE RESOURCES – INFINITE RESOURCES

Nikita Gale [aka INFINITE RESOURCES] is a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles. Nikita and I have been friends for a little while. I actually had a work with Nikita at this exhibition that I curated at the Bemis Centre in Omaha, Nebraska in 2019. One of Nikita's works was in the show, and we kept in contact. A lot of Nikita's practice is multidisciplinary. So it's sculptural, video, ephemeral. A lot of the work deals with sound, but there was no specific sonic output. My wife Rose Lazar and I do an arts edition imprint called Aventures Limited. And it's not only art books or prints, but it's also sound objects, cassettes or lathe cuts or LPs. The concept behind the imprint was to engage artists in different ways. Once again, it's this idea of pulling the artist outside of their normal framework and also injecting our own practices as artists into the work by way of layout or design decisions on the object itself.

Nikita had done this residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. While there, she did all these electronic recordings, some that were sample based. This body of work was being sat on and I wanted to make that into an edition. And so, we did a small edition of 75 lathe cuts. I found this fellow that I've worked with before, who has a high-fidelity stereo lathe cutter. And it was perfect for that, because it's a very big, clean recording. It lives in the stereo field. It's a lot of very elemental recordings. There was something very concrete about all of these recordings and how that spoke to the larger residency that she had done in the space. The lathe cut comes with a book of images, either of references to sculptural work, or references to what the sonic elements were. It was giving a sonic life to some of these referential images. The work is super strong. Nikita just opened a show at 52 Walker, which is a gallery in Manhattan, and it also is very fantastic.