Telegraph Valley
March 16-April 7, 2024
Created by LA Samuelson. In collaboration with sound artist Adam Stone and dramaturg Elle Hong. Curated by Louise Martorano.
Performances: March 21, 22, 23, 7:30pm at RedLine.
Free for RedLine members, $5 suggested donation for non-members.
About Telegraph Valley
Telegraph Valley is a performance and installation of work devoted to friction—specifically, the friction of “having a body” while “being a body.”
Telegraph Valley echoes the syntax of the telegraph, assembled from roofing material, multiplayer cassette tape loops, rotating light sources, plywood, house frames, rudimentary electricity experiments, and a dancer.
Friction is conductive. Telegraph Valley uses it to:
Reverse engineer the feeling of having sent out and/or received a message through the medium of one’s body.
Vibrate memory through matter.
Recirculate human intimacy, effort and interiority through connection with analog and digital technologies.
Communicate with the dead.
Telegraph Valley is an emergent event set in a sculptural/sonic installation that evolves with each performance. Battery powered projectors strapped to electric pottery wheels sit atop ladders at the center of the room.
As they rotate, their light beams slide across the space. A dancer runs to keep up; the light rhythmically dictates the progression of the work.
Multiplayer cassette tape loops circulate sound through a maze of magnetic tape underneath a floating floor. Visitors dip their heads into holes in the floor to listen for a traveling sonic score that reorganizes relations between maps/territory, past/future/present, death/rebirth, above/below.
LA developed Telegraph Valley through installations and performances at the Museum of Longmont, MCA Denver, Union Hall Gallery, Understudy, Black Cube, and RedLine’s 2023 and 2024 annual Resident Artist exhibition.
Telegraph Valley Performances
March 21, 22, 23, 7:30pm at RedLine (Doors at 7pm).
Photo credit: Elle Hong
LA Samuelson
LA Samuelson is an artist working in contemporary performance, sculpture, and media. Their work follows the transmission of feeling across objects, sites, and bodies, searching for new strategies to help us bear impermanence, attachments to living, and to one another.
Their projects have been presented by the Denver Art Museum, RedLine Contemporary Art, Union Hall, Understudy Denver, MCA Denver, and Black Cube Nomadic Museum. Their current work is supported by the National Performance Network, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and they are a proud alumni of the RedLine Resident Artist Program.
LA holds an MFA in Dance from CU-Boulder, with secondary emphases in visual art and somatics, and a graduate certification in Emergent Technologies & Media Arts. They are a Visiting Assistant Professor in Digital Arts & Dance at Hamilton College.
Elle Hong
Elle Hong is an antidisciplinary artist currently based in Cheyenne/Ute/Arapaho Territories (Denver, CO). She holds an MFA in Choreography with a Graduate Certificate in Emergent Technologies & Media Arts Practice from the University of Colorado Boulder, and a BA in Dance & Sociology from Wesleyan University. Elle provides dramaturgical support for artists Helanius J. Wilkins (“The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging”) and LA Samuelson (“Telegraph Valley”), and has toured as a performer for Michelle Ellsworth (“Evidence of Labor”; “Post-Verbal Social Network”).
Current research interests include improvisational processing as making, ease/effort, being/nothingness, dis/embodiments of femininity, and risk. Ultimately, she aims to feel radically present while in a state of complete dissociation, or, is trying to embody the moment/train for the times. Her work uses dance as a primary text for transcending the (representational) limitations of the body.
Adam Stone
Adam Stone is an artist who works in drawing, sound, performance, music, writing, and curation. His work in performance has ranged from theater direction and design (sound, video, scenic), to collaboration in dance, to music tours of his albums.
Leigh Kargol
Outside Eye
Support for Telegraph Valley
Telegraph Valley is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by RedLine Contemporary Art Center in partnership with Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI), square product theatre and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information, visit www.npnweb.org.
It is also made possible through collaborations with Museum of Longmont, MCA Denver, Union Hall Gallery, Understudy Denver, and Black Cube Nomadic Museum.
