For once, Saturday night the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway got me from Brooklyn to Tribeca and it didn’t cost me a $30 cab ride. Granted that’s only because I took the train to Tribeca for the DVD-premiere film screening of Sufjan Stevens’ The BQE at 92YTribeca. The BQE is a montage of images of the expressway and its surroundings Stevens captured as a commissioned project for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which wanted a film about Brooklyn but left the topic choice to the musician. According to Stevens, to understand the borough you really need to look closer at the BQE because it’s “the blood vessel of Brooklyn. The life source.” However, even though it was the vital role of the BQE in the life of Brooklynites that made it such an appealing topic choice, he was quick to qualify the reality of the “arterial expressway.”
“It’s all metaphorical because it’s obviously it’s an expressway that’s the source of death, pollution and destruction and it’s constantly falling apart, decaying and dilapidating,” Stevens said. “It’s a failed civic project. You can see it just spending a few moments looking at it.”
Stevens spent more than a few moments looking at the BQE for this project- nine months actually, and since premiering the film at BAM in 2007, the project’s expanded into a score, film, dissertation, comic book and 3-D view master reel.
“I don’t think you can really represent the project with just a screening,” Stevens said. “The BQE is multifaceted. If you look at the veneer of the BQE you can tell that it’s not a single thing. It’s like a multi media project, and that’s what makes it such a fascinating art piece.”
For Saturday night’s event, Stevens put together a multidisciplinary program of work that incorporated art, film, photography and music. It coupled a screening of the DVD and an exhibition of Denny Renshaw’s photography for The BQE with elements from Stevens work as a musician. The event started with an opening set from DM Stith, an artists on Stevens’ music label Asthmatic Kitty, and featured string quartet, Osso, played songs off their new album, Run Rabbit Run, a symphonic reconfiguration of Stevens’ album, Enjoy Your Rabbit. Songs on both albums are based on animals from the Chinese Zodiac, and an exhibition of zodiac-themed drawings Stevens’ commissioned from artist Jessica Dessner were displayed in the spaces gallery for the event.
Fortunately Stevens said, when he was putting together this project and looking to incorporate so many artistic mediums into one night, he found a venue in 92YTribeca that possesses “the sort of multi-personality disorder” his project required. And 92YTribeca director Michele Thompson said the multidisciplinary work Stevens does is just what their space looks for in exhibition.
“It’s the kind of thing the space was built for, and this is exactly the model we were envisioning,” Thompson said. “When you’ve got this much capacity it just seems like you’d want to take advantage of it. And because Sufjan is so creative, he was able to see the potential of this space and really helped us flush it out and figure it out what would work and what wouldn’t.
The coupling between the artists and space culminated in success for both with all three screenings of The BQE selling out over the weekend. Thompson credits much of the pairing success to Stevens ability to connect through his multi-medium approach to art saying:
“There’s a purity to his work and yet there’s a level of training and sophistication and intelligence and integrity that informs the entire body of the work in a way that really moves me.”
Photo by www.flickr.com/photos/tammylo/
