New arts encounters

Collaborate, celebrate, co-create is the spirit behind the AV Club, a series of experimental video, film, and music events founded by Helena Sanders '05. A Skidmore art major and WSPN radio director, she now lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

A painter who has worked as an album cover designer, exhibition curator and installer, musicians’ booking agent, and musician herself, Sanders says, "We each work hard to see our own creations thrive out in the world. But the benefits of collaborating, working across fields and comfort zones, can far outweigh any cons. It’s energizing and produces more ideas and solutions than one person could act on in a lifetime."

At times Sanders withdraws to work solo in her studio, but then she is pulled back to the "refreshing current among contemporary artists to share information openly and merge projects and ideas," which she attributes in part to the open-source ethos of the Internet.

When Sanders launched AV Club more than five years ago, her vision was to bring experimental video to a wide audience in a casual environment: "less pressure on the artists, less pressure on the audience." She explains, "We are all accustomed to acting our roles in gallery spaces. I want people to shake that off a bit and feel comfortable when they encounter something new. It's OK not to get it."

AV Club, she emphasizes, is a concept and not just a physical space. One event ran "from the back of a bicycle outfitted with a sound system and projector, at outdoor locations across the city, in the dead cold of February." She also cites "a night of artists who brought instruments sculpted from sugar, which they played into disintegration." And Oregon artists MSHR performed on "a beautiful, self-invented compound of light-sensitive instruments and touch-reactive electronics, so their music literally arose from contact between humans and the distribution of light waves." 

Sanders's own art was influenced by her study of textiles at Skidmore. She recalls textile instructors encouraging her in "exploring contemporary theory and new technologies, with nothing off-limits." She was impressed by art professor Margo Mensing's interest in both technical execution and aesthetics. When Mensing and physics professor Mary Crone Odekon co-curated the Tang Museum show A Very Liquid Heaven, it was one of Sanders's "favorite examples of stimulating all the senses and inspiring an interest in the world beyond the front of my face. It connected seemingly disparate dots into something beautiful and cohesive."

Inside and outside higher ed, Sanders notes, arts are reorganizing based on theme, rather than medium. She approves. "The question for artists becomes: Here is a problem to solve, and here is the context and the audience; now how do you address and communicate your solution?" —Helen Edelman '74