Slideshow: ‘Filling the Void’ art and music fest

A two-night multi-media art and music festival began last night at Vail-Leavitt Music Hall in Riverhead, produced by Robert Edwin of Port Jefferson and Allen Boules of Rocky Point, who are co-founders of Fresh Art Long Island and Live Recording Studios. They call it the “Filling the Void Fest.”

The festival on Friday night featured the installation, ‘The Great American Living Room,” which  reflects the nostalgic relationship that “we as a culture have with our own living rooms and how the television married the living room and had billions of children, hanging on its immediate past, fiending  for the next best thing,” according to the producers.

Mr. Boules and Mr. Edwin say the “Filling the Void Fest” represents “the resiliency of a group of artists and  musicians who resist what is forced upon them and refuse to buy into the idea that there is happiness in being numb.”

Fresh Art, founded five years ago, produces about a dozen art/music festivals a year. It is associated with Toast, a nine- year-old  gallery in Port Jefferson owned by Terry Scarlatos. Mr. Edwin said that he was a huge fan of now defunct Riverhead’s annual Blues Festival and that “Filling the Void” was in no way an effort to  replace it.

“It is our art and music festival doing it our way with our own vision,” he said.

The featured musical act Saturday night at 10 p.m. will be the Hip-Hop group “Ancient Tongue” from Connecticut. On Friday night, about 60 people attended, including the staff and the bands.

[nggallery id=154 template=galleryview]