NYAB Event - Robin Glass “Rice and Beans”

Robin Glass “Rice and Beans”

287 Spring Art Gallery & Performance Space

This event has ended.

“Rice and Beans” – a video installation by Robin Glass – is a collective portrait of humanity, with its recurring, compulsive, and absurd need to polarize. It is a poem of interventions – subversive and courageous acts of crossing boundaries to reach our invented opposites. This work is a gracefully provocative attempt to tread a vital path through the crevasses of our myopic binary beliefs.
Rice and beans, a staple in Brazil, an allegory here, are shown in their raw and grainy form, as opposites. Throughout the film, two reels play side-by-side on a divided screen as negative reflections of each other, in a sequence of four acts. Within each act, the binary of black and white switch places, united in their desire to overcome the eternal divide, yet unable to cross over.
The soundtrack (composed by the artist) blends the Berimbau (a traditional Brazilian instrument) with the more familiar sounds of pianos, keyboards and voices, and forcefully evokes the formal and semantic tensions between the images on the screen. A shower of beans and rice challenges the dissonant chords of a piano, while the speeches by Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden project the polar aspirations of their followers, and voices from the East and West become an inseparable – yet constantly conflicted – whole.
“Rice and Beans” is both classical in its formal construction, and boldly modern in its attempt to break the continuing divisions of culture, race, gender, politics, and sex.

Robin Glass is an Anglo-Brazilian artist, musician and filmmaker. Robin comes from an eclectic background, in which his film career is a recent addition. Trained in theology and fine arts, he has worked as a business executive, NGO director, musician, diver, lecturer and artist, among other professions. Robin’s work has been presented internationally, receiving critical acclaim and a number of awards. The presentation of “Rice and Beans” at 287 Spring Art Gallery & Performance Space is Robin’s first solo show in New York.