Test Pattern 08: Raúl de Nieves + Jessie Stead + Sergei Tcherepnin

For Test Pattern 08, multimedia artists Raúl de Nieves, Jessie Stead and Sergei Tcherepnin collaborate in a performance combining music, theater, and an irreverent approach to art history. In Night At The Museum, a schoolboy finds himself locked into a museum overnight, and encounters a series of outlandish characters, including a singing janitor and talking paintings (Girl With A Pearl Earring, Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe). The performance will be followed by a conversation with ICA Assistant Curator of Performance David Riley.

Raúl de Nieves is a multimedia artist, performer, and musician, whose wide-ranging practice investigates notions of beauty and transformation. De Nieves’ visual symbolism draws on both classical Catholic and Mexican vernacular motifs to create his own unique mythology. Through processes of accumulation and adornment, the artist transforms readily available materials into spectacular objects, which he then integrates into immersive narrative environments.
Recent solo institutional exhibitions include The Treasure House of Memory, ICA Boston; Eternal Return & the Obsidian Heart, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; and Reemerge the Zero Begins Your Life, Eternal is Your Light, SCAD Museum of Art. De Nieves has participated in numerous group exhibitions including those at The Highline, MoMA PS1, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Documenta 14, Performa 13, ICA Philadelphia, The Kitchen, Artist’s Space and numerous other venues. His work is included in the collections of ICA Boston, Whitney Museum of American Art, and MOCA, Los Angeles. De Nieves was born in 1983, in Michoacan, Mexico and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Jessie Stead works in overlapping patterns of installation, music, cinema, text, and performance. Her work has been presented in recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Jenny’s (NY), Ciccio (NY), OCDChinatown (NY), Jan Kaps (Cologne), and 247365 (NY). Collaborative projects, group exhibitions and performances include the Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw, Poland), Fridericianum (Kassel, Germany), the ICA Philadelphia, and Performa 13. Stead’s cinematic work has screened at The London Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives (NY), MoCAD (Detroit), and in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2010). She is the electronic percussionist and composer/producer of the art-band Hairbone (formerly Haribo). Hairbone’s debut LP Earth To Momma, produced by Stead, was released in 2018 by Blank Forms Editions.

Sergei Tcherepnin is an artist operating at the intersections of sound, sculpture and theater. Attaching synthesizers, computers and amplifiers to small surface transducers (devices that convert electrical signals into vibrations) he orchestrates complex multi-channel compositions in which objects are transformed into speakers. Often invoking queer, hybridized characters such as the Listening Cactus, the Maize Mantis, or the figure of the Pied Piper, Tcherepnin’s scenarios cultivate play between things and bodies, compelling the audience to develop a “score” for handling these animated objects. Tcherepnin’s performances and installations have been featured at The Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art, The Venice Biennale, The Kitchen, The Guggenheim Museum, and the 30th São Paulo Biennial, among others.