ARTIST BIO
St Celfer, of Korean and American origins, is an audiovisual artist and composer that floats between New York, Seattle, and São Paulo, where you will find drawings in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC-USP).
Initially self-taught, he made art objects while preparing as an athlete for the 1992 Olympics. After competing in Barcelona, being an enthusiastic fan of music, he moved to Seattle. He later studied art in Philadelphia. In 1999 he relocated to Brooklyn and showed installations applying painting’s ideas of plasticity to everyday inexpensive objects (Gleaned Detritus Project™) at Andrew Kreps Gallery, Fluxfactory, Front Room (NY) and Soil (Seattle). Adding an interactive element he followed the same approach in the medium of sound (Listeners™) exhibiting at Caren Golden Fine Art, Bronx River Art Center and vertexList (NY). Furthermore he performed in 2000’s New York music scene at CBGB's, The Kitchen, Tonic, The Tank, Remote Lounge, Rocky's, Galapagos Art Space, Sputnik, and Stinger Club. Upon leaving New York frustrated with the notion of making a living through object production, he extended his visual work to the digital realm (eyekhan.com & gnitcelfer.blogspot.com) by creating images and sounds based on failing digital processes as shown at the Toronto Harbourfront Center, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Mutaforma's Venice Biennial, and Balaclava Gallery (London).
Since the isolation of the pandemic, St Celfer has released hundreds of songs on dozens of albums which have been played on radio stations around the world including WZBC & WMBR (Boston), WFMU's Ridgewood Radio, Freaking Out & Push Button Heaven (New York), KHUH's Radio Eclectus on Hollow Earth Radio, KCBS's Flotation Device & CMPFR-22c on Realmorereal (Seattle), WOZO's Audio Collision (Knoxville), Marja Nuut's Tikrishow (Estonia), FM104.7's Lost & Found Sounds & FM89.7's Spirit House (Sydney), KHUH's Urban Mutant (Vancouver), yawrats (Poland), and Oolongradio (Berlin). He has recently performed at Outpost Artist Resources's Fire Over Heaven (New York), ICOSA & Super Happy Fun Land (Texas), Espaço Garganta, Instituto de Artes - UNESP & Casa Locomotiva (São Paulo), vekks (Vienna), BBAGB, iN Gallery, Temescal Arts Center - TAC & the Lab (California) & Shed, Slip Gallery, Wayward Music Series & SPAM New Media Festival at the Georgetown Steam Plant (Seattle).
He has been named four times New & Notable by Bandcamp each year 2021-4 and is the featured wave track for Infrasonica issue #7, 'Voicing Abstraction'.
He has recent interviews conducted by School of Commons (Zurich), Tom Moody (New York), Art Music Lit (Sacramento), Invert/Extant (UK), Malevich Squared (London), Art Scene West (San Diego), and Shed (Seattle).
STATEMENT
St Celfer currently has 2 projects that accept delusion as an omnipresent part of human adaptation, a way to make sense of our world, one very different from other living things: 1. examining our presuppositions underlying perception and fighting the tyranny of the square: the urge to codify and name (Space Between Points™)
2. acquiescing to the adaptive function of delusion, the need to invent and mythologize (Step.4D™).
Space Between Points™
Visually St Celfer breaks the plane of the wall through the application of marks, though applied to the surface, they inhabit another dimension.
Aurally St Celfer breaks the bounds of the cube by launching 16 sound sources into the 8 corners of a square space, thereby creating a sonic tesseract.
The sound source for Space Between Points™, Suites #1-9, overloads our abilities to filter information. As a composer St Celfer makes measureless, asynchronous music with jumps in scale and time. It’s not noise, ambient, or chance music which fall into known structures themselves. To do this St Celfer takes the contemporary fad that’s killing popular music and turns it on its head by crashing autotune software with tasks it cannot handle. It’s an invented means of synthesis rather than the current trend of imitating past modes.
St Celfer’s shows take time to install since adjustments are made in order to make the work fit the space and convincingly transform it. Each installation is unique to the place it lives. This shaman-like activity relates to St Celfer’s alternate career as an Olympic rower and coach and to his personal experience with rhythms of the mind.
Step.4D™:
Transitioning from an in-studio process of the "Suites”, St Celfer's energies have gone into the interface between man and machine. He has made an instrument, homemade, or more accurately, “gambiarra,” in Brasilian Portuguese. It mounts to a single mic stand with interconnected gear attached and arranged so that the player can best make music in the moment (as opposed to tracking and then arranging). Sound is amalgamated and congealed into a resolution of crossed and overloaded signals. It is a future folk machine made of redundant or repurposed musical parts, capable of the most complex improvised structures, an instrument based upon 'lógica orgânica da favela', a human process of city making reapplied to the structure of an instrument , one that is simultaneously beyond the possibility of human control, like nature, while bringing enjoyment to people through organization beyond language - unsaid, nonverbal communication.