NEW ORLEANS, LA.- Masonic symbols, devotional paintings to Joan of Arc, Stations of the Cross, heavy metal album covers, Ted Riederer’s burning guitars reflect his ongoing investigation into the redemptive power of music. A bricolage of punk rock imagery from his youth, a quasi-Shinto belief that objects are conduits of the divine, and the existential cry that divinity is within ourselves, Riederer uses electric guitars, vinyl records, and drums to illustrate how music redeemed his adolescent angst, and how music and the visual arts continues to uplift and empower his personal growth.
A month after Riederer’s Never Records New Orleans project, which radio station WWOZ described as “extraordinary”, Riederer returns to New Orleans to provide more clues to a body of work that spans several traditional art mediums, as well as performance art, and conceptual art. During his month long performance art installation, Riederer recorded and cut to vinyl over 134 performances by musicians, historians, authors, Mardis Gras Indians, Bounce MCs, poets, and average people and sounds from the street. The goal of Never Records was to create a secular community with the same spiritual uplift of a church without the politics of religion, as well as to challenge conservative ideas about money, music, and art.
“Your Love never survived the heat of my heart” includes an opening night performance where 4 drummers play a drum set with 40 dozen roses instead of drumsticks. The rose petals and drums remain throughout the duration of the show. The exhibition also contains oil paintings, made with old master mediums and leaded glass powder, ink on paper meditations of 45 rpm records cum mandalas, photographs of record albums that Riederer has transformed into skulls, and poems made with blacked out album covers. Editioned ephemera from Never Records New Orleans is also available.
One-time refugee from punk and sometime band member, Ted Riederer has armed himself with photography equipment, painting supplies, electric guitars, amplifiers, old LPs, record players, drum kits,hard disk recorders, a vinyl record lathe, and long stemmed roses as he’s ambled artistically from the Americas to the Antipodes. His work has been shown nationally and internationally including exhibitions at PS1, Prospect 1.5, Goff and Rosenthal Berlin, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery (San Francisco), Marianne Boesky Gallery, Context Gallery (Derry, Ireland), David Winton Bell Gallery (Brown University), The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, the Liverpool Biennial, and the Dhaka Arts Center, Bangladesh.
His Never Records project has traveled from New York, to Liverpool, to Derry, and London which was sponsored by the Tate Modern. Never Records New Orleans took place from October 6th-November 4th, 2012 and was featured on WWOZ, The Times Picayune, Pelican Bomb, NOLA Defender, Anti Gravity, and Gambit Weekly.
