By Marina Rosenfeld
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
Sunday 28 May 2006
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Electra presented Marina Rosenfeld's Sheer Frost Orchestra as part of Tate Modern's Long Weekend. The Sheer Frost Orchestra appeared within Musicircus, a three hour piece developed by John Cage in 1967 for performance in the Stock Pavilion at the University of Illinois in Champagne, Urbana.
Sheer Frost Orchestra is an all-female 17 electric guitar ensemble featuring amateur musicians. The orchestra
play their guitars with nail polish bottles in a range of techniques devised and instructed by Rosenfeld. The
performance at Tate Modern was preceded by a day long workshop in which the players learn how to play a guitar
using unique scratching and rubbing techniques and are taught to follow a graphic score created by Rosenfeld
especially for the performance.
Marina Rosenfeld is based New York based artist. Her sound compositions, live performances and music/ photography/video installations have been presented at numerous festivals, museums, galleries internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial, Deitch Projects and Creative Time. Rosenfeld is also the creator and director of the critically acclaimed Sheer Frost Orchestra, the 17-woman electric-guitar orchestra she founded in 1994. She is also a frequent improvisor/collaborator and has worked with artists including Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth and Merce Cunningham.
