& Tony.Is.Here.Now. Talkformance in Tribute to Tony Conrad
by Tony Billoni

Rescheduled from 1/12/18
Exhibition continues through March 2, 2018

Culled from nearly 40 years of Hallwalls' still, video, and audio archives (1977–2014), this exhibition will serve as a prelude to Introducing Tony Conrad, the upcoming retrospective at the UB Art Gallery and Albright Knox Art Gallery, by showcasing a selection of videos, stills, and audio documenting Conrad's decades-long association with Hallwalls as visual artist, performance artist, musician, video artist, and curator of music, performance, and video.

Performances will be looped and presented in the gallery alongside a photo montage of Conrad at Hallwalls. This exhibition is rare and unusual for Hallwalls, which more typically exhibits new works made by living artists directly for the gallery. But Conrad's history with Hallwalls stretches back to its earliest years and continued over five successive decades. The digitization and cataloguing of Hallwalls' archives—all of our archives, not merely those that include Conrad—has been a decade-long project that still continues and it is with great honor, reverence, and remembrance that Tony Conrad is the first subject of an exhibition derived entirely from those archives. Open in both spirit and presentation, Tony Conrad @ Hallwalls strives to be an evocative point of entry into the wider survey premiering in February at UB Art Gallery and in March at the Albright Knox Art Gallery before eventually traveling to ICA Philadelphia and MIT's List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Mass.

SCHEDULING NOTE: 

To avoid conflicting with colleague organizations' art events previously scheduled for the remaining Fridays in January 2018, we rescheduled the postponed opening reception for Tony Conrad & Hallwalls AND the performance Tony.Is.Here.Now. Talkformance in Tribute to Tony Conrad by Tony Billoni for Tuesday evening, January 23, 2018, with the performance to start at 7:00 p.m. in the Cinema and the opening continuing in the Gallery until 10:00 p.m.

Tony Billoni's Talkformance will also feature an original musical composition created and performed by Biff Henrich & Gary Nickard (of The Vores), Dave Gilmet (of Global Village Idiots, After Hours, The Bipolaroids, Baci e Ceci, & Church Key Social), Dave McCreery (of Paper Faces, Crawlspace, Mommy Super High, & After Hours), and Dietrich Olivier Ds (who recently composed and produced the music [and persona] of the fictitious "Ulysses Atwhen" for the exhibition Fictions: Julian Montague at Anna Kaplan Contemporary).

Tony Billoni's rescheduled Talkformance also inaugurates our monthly Tony Tuesdays series, which will take place in the Cinema on the fourth Tuesday of each month January 23–May 22, 2018. Future Tony Tuesdays are on February 27, March 27, April 24, and May 22.