
Reared amid the 1960s counterculture, artist David Schmidlapp has been living and creating in lower Manhattan since the early 1970s. His decades of work in film, photography, performance, artist’s books, and alternative editorial projects are unified by an unbridled fluidity between formats that favors process over product. This live event centers on Schmidlapp’s slide performances, which were staged across the Downtown scene as expanded cinema pieces, multimedia collaborations with live bands, and environmental nightclub installations. The program reprises two analog slide works presented at Club 57 in 1980 under the billing Slides of Politics and Fashion: Fas Gas was adapted from a Soho Weekly News style piece shot in an abandoned gas station, while What of the City Is Left Naked to the Night, an uncanny vision of outdoor slumber in Manhattan’s fringes, found its inspiration in city homelessness. Schmidlapp’s social edge and urban focus (he founded International Graffiti Times, which ran from 1983 to 1994) are matched by his dexterous crafting of narrative and atmosphere through multilayered projections. The evening culminates in a special appearance by painter, Andy Warhol associate, and punk violinist Walter Steding. Steding, a longtime musical collaborator of Schmidlapp’s, will play strings and noise machines with the images onscreen.