120520. Improvise Combustion&Strange. Day 1.

Improvise Combustion is a group show organized by member Chris Mendoza, featuring a collection of collaborations and new work by Michael Miyahira aka Mike Ming, Kenji Hirata, Pablo Power, & Naomi Kazama.

Improvise Combustion is a show concept to liken the visual medium to a group jazz ensemble. It is a week long studio session of soloists to perform as a single form, a band unit, similar to the work of great improvisational musicians. For this particular session, it is an opportunity for the artists to re-unite and re-ignite collaborative connections. The end result is an opening featuring the mural canvas, or perhaps the bands melodies and rhythms, as the rest of the gallery space is transformed to the soloist's moods and collaborations. These artists are old friends from different parts of the world, and are only able to connect because of travel timing. Some are friends from childhood, having a connection of roots that run deep, having shared experiences and the support of each other over a long period of time, but sometimes only separated in physical proximity and time. Despite a decade of collaborating, somehow in all this time, this particular group has never individually fully connected to concert a single collaborative show concept, until now. This show is about unity, society and true collaboration. There is no head or tail but rather like an organic landscape, a sound-scape and visual-scape that embraces and connects to create and unfold a story of improvising magicians unleashing and expressing for the sake of creating. This is the story of atoms colliding and energy bursting creating chaotical in the midst of controlled expressions, ultimately, an 'Improvise Combustion'. The Show will run from 05.26.2012 to 06.13.2012 @154 Smart Clothes, 164 Suffolk Street Between Houston and Stanton in beautiful Lower East Side Manhattan. NYC Opening will be on Saturday, May 26. 7 pm until 10 pm. Finally Naomi and Strange are on a live screen printing tour, and will set up outside "Improvise Combustion" for some unique live screen printing. Strange will be performing from 1 pm until 6 pm on both Saturday May 26th and Sunday May 27. Strange is a live screen printing group that offers to create unique images from either provided templates or 'experimental creations' from the master hands of Naomi to create on-the-fly designs. It is $10 per 'pull'/screen on your favorite clothing item or $40 with provided 100% cotton shirts sourced and created for Strange. 1% of profits of the shirts will also go to the planet. Thank you for reading. ALL GOOD IN THE HOOD,