Yardmeter VIII: Saturday, March 20, 6-8 p.m.

Please join us for a night of photography, poetry, and klezmer!

I have always been inspired with random, low quality, distorted pictures. I became interested in the pictures that other people would discard. I love to find a picture someone has lost, and is trashed on the street. I can't help picking it and making up a story about the person. Recently I started to radically crop and destroy my pictures until I hit the point where its no longer a picture.

--Sebastian Vikkelsoe-Pedersen

Yardmeter 8 presents:

Photography by

Sebastian Vikkelsoe-Pedersen,

poetry readings by

Matthew Henriksen,

Leah Souffrant,

and klezmer by Jeff Perlman,

Patrick Farrell

& others from Romashka.

The wine will flow freely

Saturday, March 20, 6-8 p.m.

Sebastian Vikkelsoe-Pederson was born in Denmark and grew up on a commune. As a child he was sent to Rudolf Steiner school that emphasized artistic expression. In 1998 he traveled to London to study Photography at the Kent institute of art and design and studied for a BA. After college he started working as a photo assistant. His experience was mostly with fashion photographers, which still shines through in his pictures.

Matthew Henriksen is the author of the chapbooks Is Holy (horse less press, 2006) and Another Word (DoubleCross Press, 2009). Some recent poems appear in Realpoetik, Raleigh Quarterly, Front Porch, The Cultural Society, Handsome Journal and The Concher. He co-edits Typo, an online poetry journal, and publishes Cannibal Books, a book arts poetry press. From 2005 to 2008 he curated The Burning Chair Readings in Brooklyn and now hosts irregular readings throughout the country. A special feature of Frank Stanford’s unpublished poems and fiction, selected by Henriksen, will appear in the upcoming issue of Fulcrum. He lives and teaches in the Ozark Mountains.

Leah Souffrant is founding co-chair of the Poetics Group at the Graduate Center (CUNY), where she is a doctoral candidate. In 2007 she was awarded a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Most recently, her artist book Essay for Elsa was featured in an exhibition at the AIR Gallery in Dumbo. You can read her work here, here, and here.

Jeff Perlman (on clarinet, alto saxophone) has been charming audiences with klezmer music since starting his first band in 1995, while still a high school student. He was an integral part of the Yale Klezmer Band for four years (1997-2001) as well as a founding member of the Wandering Jews Traveling Klezmer Band with whom he toured across North America on the Big Schlepp tour in the Summer of 2001. Lately, Perlman has been focusing his attention on the living musical traditions of Eastern Europe, particularly from Moldova, Romania and Ukraine. He has traveled extensively throughout Eastern Europe (and the Eastern European parts of NYC) collecting and recording traditional music in its native context, and he twice participated in Klezfest Ukraine. Perlman lives in Brooklyn and can be seen performing regularly with the Village Klezmer Quintet, Romashka Gypsy Collective, Klez Que C'est?, KlezSka, and others.

Patrick Farrell is a Brooklyn, NY based accordionist, brass fanatic, composer and bandleader. He leads his own band, the circus/new-music/comedy group Stagger Back Brass Band, and is also a member of the chamber/folk group Ljova and the Kontraband and Michael Winograd’s Klezmer Ensemble. Other current groups include Russian/Romanian Roma-music ensemble Romashka, Serbian-inspired brass band Veveritse, and various improvisational and new music settings. Patrick plays a 120-bass “Superior 2 President Oro” converter piano accordion made by Guerrini & Figli Accordion Makers of Castelfidardo, Italy.

Romashka is the Russian word for "daisy."