Probability: Bodil and Larnie Fox
March 5 through April 2, 2022
Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS, Oakland, California
Opening Reception, March 5th 2022 6pm-9pm at Pro Arts
Special showings Friday, Saturday, Sunday 2pm-5pm only by appointment. Email bodilarnfox@gmail.com to RSVP.
Probability, an exhibition of interactive sound sculpture made collaboratively by visual artists Bodil Fox and Larnie Fox, will be on display at Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS from March 5 through April 2, 2022. Email <bodilarnfox@gmail.com> to reserve a time to interact with the work and meet the artists, Fridays through Sundays, 2-5pm.
The exhibition and related performances will revolve around notions of chance, indeterminacy, and luck.
The exhibition will be anchored by a performative installation covering the main walls with self-playing and playable wall-mounted amplified sound sculptures. Elements of the installation are constructed to allow for chance sounds and interactions of sounds. Sounds are produced by amplified piezo contact microphones. Larnie and Bodil have used similar installations for performances on floors for the past few years. They have adapted techniques and strategies learned doing this floor-based work to the new wall-based work. The audience will be invited to interact with this work to produce sound.
The installation will combine materials favored by Bodil (copper, concrete, wire, felt, mixed media surface treatment) with those favored by Larnie (bamboo, plywood, recycled materials, motors).
There will be three events using the installation Probability as a locus:
The opening reception will be March 5th, 6-9pm, and will include a performance. Bay Area sound artists Sudhu Tewari and Jen Boyd will join Bodil and Larnie in “playing the room”; creating semi-random soundscapes produced by the low-tech machines and interactive sound sculptures.
The gallery will also serve as the starting point for a dicewalk, Sunday March 20, 3-5pm. A dicewalk is a way of moving randomly through an urban environment; participants roll a die each time they come to an intersection. Using a die to determine direction allows for surprising discoveries. Gather at 3pm, depart at 3:10pm. Wear good walking shoes and dress in layers.
The closing reception will be Saturday, April 2, 6-9pm. Pro Arts will celebrate its long, storied occupancy of its space on Frank Ogawa Plaza. Refreshments will be served, and the Crank Ensemble will perform. They began in 2005 and have not performed together since 2015. Larnie builds their instruments from recycled materials, each with a piezo contact microphone and a hand crank. They produce sound that is a mechanical version of a digital loop.
This will be the last exhibition Pro Arts hosts at our beloved space at Oscar Grant Plaza in downtown Oakland.
Pro Arts will continue to support Oakland’s artistic community through current and new programs, led and produced in solidarity with other commons-centric sites and artistic practices in Oakland and beyond.
About Bodil and Larnie Fox
Bodil and Larnie Fox are visual artists who work together on sound art and installations. Collaborations include dicewalks, performances as a duo and also with Contraption Quartet and the 14 member Crank Ensemble. Among other things, they created Birdhouse, a kinetic and olfactory installation for Vallejo’s Visions of the Wild festival; made Clepsydra, a sound and water installation at the Benicia Historical Museum; built and “flew” a 23-foot bamboo and muslin airplane/kite for Burning Man; made a giant kinetic dragonfly for the DuPage Museum near Chicago; designed and built the sets for Theatre of Yugen's Cycle Plays at Theatre Artaud in San Francisco. They were awarded a three-month joint residency at the Montalvo Art Center in 2016. They live and work together in an old house near the water in Benicia, California.
Bodil Fox holds an MFA and BA in Art with an emphasis on textiles from San Francisco State University, an AA in Visual Communication from Shoreline Community College in Seattle and has studied at Engelsholm Textile Højskole College, Vejle, Denmark. She works with unusual materials such as concrete, wire, fortune cookie notes, sewing threads, pleated paper, patinated copper, and enjoys making “fake instruments”. Bodil is especially interested in counting and how to count/express time visually and in performance. She has shown her work at numerous Bay Area locations including Thoreau Center Art Gallery, California Crafts Museum, Arts Benicia, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Art Rise Gallery, Vorpal Gallery, Sanchez Art Center, Bridge ARTSpace, and SFSU Art Gallery.
Larnie Fox is known for monumental bamboo sculpture, kinetic sculpture, sound installations, performance, and painting. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions locally and nationally including one-person exhibitions in San Francisco at the Lab, the Randall Museum, and the Center for New Music, and also at the Richmond Art Center. He founded the Crank Ensemble who performed on his invented hand-cranked instruments, and currently is inventing instruments, composing and performing with the new-music group the Contraption Quartet. He holds an MFA in Painting from the University of Utah and is the former Director of the Children's Fine Art Program at the Palo Alto Art Center and former Executive Director of Arts Benicia, a regional art center.