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Gabriel Saloman Mindel* is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and scholar based in Minneapolis, MN and Santa Cruz, CA.
Mindel’s research focuses on the relationship between noise, protest, and power. His writing has appeared in both scholarly and para-academic publications, including Resonance: Journal of Sound and Culture, RadioDoc Review, Sounding Out!, Folklife Magazine and The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. For over two decades he has performed and recorded experimental music under his own name and in collaborations with Anna Friz, KM Walker, Michael Red, and the group Yellow Swans, among others. He is currently working on a multi-year curatorial project titled “Landscape & Life” that investigates how contemporary artists reckon with the entangled legacies of landscape art and settler colonialism. Mindel received an MFA from Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts and is completing a PhD in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. His dissertation project, “Profanity: Performance, Protest and the Sovereign Politics of Noise,” argues for noise’s potential to radically transform, evade, and abolish structures of political power that constrain people’s everyday cultural, political, and social lives.
Mindel has been performing experimental, conceptual and freely improvised music for over 20 years. From their 2001 founding to the duo’s final shows (and subsequent hiatus) in 2008, Mindel and Pete Swanson performed as Yellow Swans, carving an influential path through America’s experimental music underground, at the axis of noise, psychedelia, industrial, drone, and hardcore. Yellow Swans have recently become active once again, releasing music from their archives and as of 2023 once again performing for live audiences. During his break from activity with Yellow Swans, Mindel performed and released music solo as Gabriel Saloman. Many of these compositions stem from collaborations with choreographers such as The Contingency Plan, Daisy Karen Thompson, Lisa Gelly Martin, Rob Kitsos, 605 Collective and Vanessa Goodman. He has also performed in a variety of collaborative duos, including with artist Aja Bond (Diadem), producer Michael Red (Chambers), and transmission artist Anna Friz with whom he has been developing work in response to the afterlives of wildfires on the California coast.
Mindel has a longstanding practice of exhibition making and curatorial projects, working solo and in a variety of collaborative artist groups. Beginning in 2003 he collaborated with Red 76 on such projects as “Fellow Travellers” for Manifesta 8 in Murcia, Spain; “Surplus Seminar” at the Walker Art Center; and “Counter-culture as Pedagogy” for CCA’s Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art; ‘Power 2012′ at Unitt/Pitt in connection with Institutions by Artists and the Bronx Museum; ‘Second Home’ as part of the San Jose 2008 Zero1 Biennial; ‘The Battery Republic,’ part of Creative Time’s ‘Democracy in America’; and CCAD and the Bureau for Open Culture’s “Descent to Revolution.” From 2011-2015 he organized The Strathcona Art Gallery / STAG Library , a semi-public, semi-private gallery, library and event space in Vancouver, BC with artist Aja Bond. During this time he also co-founded the Lower Mainland Painting Co., an investigation into art, labour and art labourers. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Unit/Pitt Projects, 221a, and the Audain Gallery (all Vancouver, BC). His curatorial projects have included work “Future Concrete” and “Art and Parenthood” at Unit/Pitt Projects (Vancouver); “Landscape & Life” at Indexical (Santa Cruz); and “Love & Revelation” at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.
* Gabriel Mindel has published, performed, and been credited under a small array of pseudonyms including Gabriel Mindel-Saloman, Gabriel Saloman, and GMS.
Mindel can be contacted directly at…
GMINDEL “a”-in-a-spiral UCSC black-dot EDU
Artworks | Music | Writings | Teaching | CV
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Diadem Discos & Library 