Sound Explorer Anna Homler Announces Auckland Show

Los Angeles experimental musician and performance artist Anna Homler has announced a special headline show at Auckland's Unitarian Church this February, presented by the Audio Foundation. Known internationally for her long-running series of 'Breadwoman' performances wearing a costume made out of bread, Homler's art practice has explored unexpected intersections of sounds and visuals for over thirty years. She'll be joined by local multimedia artists The Projector Band for a gripping evening of avant-garde audiovisual activity, check out the details below...

Anna Homler
Friday 2nd February, Auckland Unitarian Church, 1A Ponsonby Road, Auckland
Ticket presales available Monday 22 January via UTR.

Listen to Homler's collaborative track with Steve Moshier 'Ee Chê' from their album Breadwoman & Other Tales (RVNG Intl.)...

Watch a short film covering Homler's sound and performance practice...

Press release:

Audio Foundation is very proud to present: Los Angeles performance artist, improvisor and cosmic-explorer, Anna Homler, for one show at Auckland's Unitarian Church on Ponsonby Road. Homler is a underground legend of Los Angeles visual and performing arts, a veteran who has performed and exhibited her staggering array of distinctive projects at venues around the world, with a sensibility at once ancient and post-modern. Best known for her long running performance series, Breadwoman, which sees Homler performing in a costume entirely of bread, for this event Homler will present her scenographic, multi medial project, Pharmica Poetica – a 30+ year exploration of the poetics of everyday objects and the transformative potential of sound and image. With an improvised melodic language of her own making, Homler teases out relations between words and objects, hinting at their inherent symbolic and tonal qualities in a demonstration of how that which is literal can become lyrical.

Inspired by the work of authors as diverse as Paracelsus and Marsilio Ficino, Homler frst began developing this long- form, conceptual project in the late 1980s, presenting it frst on Los Angeles-based KPFK as part of an exhibition at a storefront gallery in Hollywood. Live, the Pharmacia Poetica is a multifaceted extravaganza, offering viewers a mixture of remedies: sound, poetry, metalanguage, images, and objects. Like the archetypical apothecary, a defning feature of the performance is Homler's vast collection of glassware, in which the hidden beauty of commonplace objects in exemplifed, suspended in liquid. The Pharmacia has travelled throughout the United States and Europe, where it is enacted again and again in collaboration with other artists and writers – always the same but different. For this performance, Homler will perform with renowned local vibraphonist, John Bell, resident for the past fve years in Korea, and well known throughout Aotearoa for his work as a soloist and with groups Spoilers of Utopia, John Bell Trio, The Dominion Centenary Concert Band and many more.

Supporting Homler and Bell's performance are Auckland's own multimedia group, The Projection Band, who will present Transformotion, a new work for small ensemble and projected image. For this event, The Projection Band will be comprised of Ivan Mršić (loperbow springosonic sink, whistles, synthesizer, objects), Rui Inaba (prepared acoustic bass guitar, synthesizer, sound objects) and Phill Dryson (prepared electric guitar, synthesizer, sound objects).