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 first began developing this long-form, conceptual project in the late 1980s, presenting it first 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 defining feature of the performance is Homler’s vast collection of glassware, in which the hidden beauty of commonplace objects in exemplified, 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 five 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).

Anna Homler’s Pharmica Poetica –
http://annahomler.com/pharmacia-poetica/

Anna Homler: A Collector of Mysteries (2008, 15min)
Documentary link –

Anna Homler, an interview with Sanda Song –
http://www.papermag.com/meet-anna-homler-the-80s-avant-garde-artist-behind-breadwoman-1586972549.html

Friday 2 February @ Auckland Unitarian Church, 1A Ponsonby Rd., Auckland, 8.00pm
Tickets available for $15 from UnderTheRadar.co.nz, or for $20 at the door.