IN, OF, FROM: EXPERIMENTS IN SOUND
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
View of the installation design
In, Of, From: Experiments in Sound
University Gallery, UF
September 10, 2020 – December 5, 2020
In, Of, From: Experiments in Sound is an exhibition that explores new ways of understanding the relationship between art and new media. University Galleries was granted the funds for this exhibition by Creative B, a program funded 10 years ago to consolidate the collective resources and talents of the many creative activities at University of Florida, which is focused this year in the relation between art & technology.
This is exhibition will focus in a group of contemporary artists that have been experimenting with sound in their work and is being organized in collaboration with artists Cecilia López and Jules Gimbrone. The exhibition intends to response to the invitation to explore the relationship between art and technology by understanding how important is to bring critical views to this relationship in our current cultural context saturated with the presence and abuse of technology.
The artists included in the exhibition go beyond the celebratory response that generates a simplistic reaction to the possibilities of collaboration and integration of the arts with other disciplines. Instead of the quest for virtuosity and illusionism that pervades non-critical approaches we have found that the most interesting artists experimenting with sound today bring a different and more complex experience to the art context and demand a more engage viewer.
Most of the works in the exhibition creates a tension with and question accepted forms of understanding art practices. This kind of works require to rethink the specifics temporalities and spatiality of exhibition making and open up a discussion that we consider significant to create new dialogues in the academic context and beyond.
The exhibition will be divided in three different forms of presentations: the main installations (Stages), referential works by historic artists (Documents) and related artists’ interventions (Walls). The main installations will be presented by Cecilia López, Jules Gimbrone and Nikita Gale. For Cecilia López one of the more interesting and unique characteristics of this type of artistic practice engaged in sound experiments is to explore the material, almost sculptural qualities of sound pieces as in the case with a generation of artists that has been working for the last twenty years. The idea of giving a sound piece a certain degree of autonomy speaks both of its complex relations to the art system standard forms of valorization and to a different understanding of the conditions of receivership.
The title In, Of, From: Experiments in Sound is a reference to the exhibition Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine curated by Cathy de Zegher in which she argues for on the feminine as subject in constant flux in the same way we understand the artists experiment with sound as engaging in a practice that implies to question the fixed identities associated with art. As de Zegher wrote in her catalogue essay for the exhibition, her curatorial “working method allows gender to be considered not as constituted coherently in different historical contexts but as intersected by racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities,” and understanding of how to approach difference and multiplicity that has become increasingly pertinent in our times. For us, concomitantly, to engage in an exhibition where the works deal with sound is to work with a matter in constant flux. The subtitle, Experiments in Sound refers to the legendary collective Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) a funded in 1967 by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, that also produced the mythical series of performances known as 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering in 1966.
Works in the Exhibition
Scene: One
Cecilia López / Fanfarria (TBC)
Artist Bio:
Cecilia Lopez is a composer, musician and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work explores perception and transmission processes focusing on the relationship between sound technologies and listening practices. She works across the media of performance, sound, installation, sculpture and the creation of sound devices. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College and an MA from Wesleyan University in composition.
Title: RED (d), 2020
Speaker cable, speaker cones, piezoelectric microphones, drums.
Dimensions 36W x 36W x 80H
RED, in its different iterations, is a piece that investigates interactions with unstable acoustic feedback systems. It is simultaneously a sculpture and a sonic process. The piece consists on a speaker-wire weaved net that contains drums and snare drums and functions as a complex sound producing feedback organism. The cables that make up the net are connected to speakers and contact microphones turning its structure into a instrument that resonates with the bodies of the drums.
Being physically hung from the ceiling, it attracts the audience’s attention as a living and autonomous object, around which there is no neutral point of listening. The audience is invited to be part of the space, where they both affect and are affected by the sound phenomena. Sound is modulated by “presence” and occupies the space as acoustic architecture.
Curricular engagements Fanfarria: art and sounds, acoustic architecture spectatorship, affect, gender studies, representation, institutional critique, body-space relationships.
Scene: Two
Jules Gimbrone / TRAPS and TRANSMUTATIONS
Artist Bio:
Jules Gimbrone (b. 1982 Pittsburgh; lives and works in NYC) creates fragile corporeal sound and sculptural ensembles that highlight the differentiations between modes of perceptual acquisition—specifically visual and sonic—within complex and precarious arrangements of subjects and objects.
Traps and Transmutations, 2 is a cosmology of vibrating actants and actors composed on a resonating stage. The traps come in the appearance of static forms, recording mechanisms and quantifiable technologies. The transmutations are all of the forces pushing away from, cutting, degrading and liberating these forms. Sound as a form of energy transfer, literally pushes through the forms: knives, cast soap, water balls, microphones cast in resin, and a desiccated banana are all cast into vibratory ecstasy through a composition of audio included the artist’s breath blowing up a balloon, the recording of the motor of a fan, and a series of feedback exercises with the stage. The most explicit symbol of the body, a 5 ft resonating glass vessel is filled with salt water and other organic detritus is animated by the artist’s voice chanting the phrase “concave, convex” as a sort of transubstantiatiatory ritual.
At what point is a vibrating sack of molecules legible as an object? What makes it so and what are the forces that act upon it to assist or degrade this legibility? Is the convex curve of a hip enough to signify a gender? At what point does that curve become a symbol? Can we chart the precise moment of categorization? What are the possibilities if we can’t?
Curricular engagements TRAPS and TRANSMUTATIONS: art and sounds, transgression, gender + LGBTQI studies, representation, institutional critique, body-space relationships.
Traps and Transmutations, 2
Scene: Three
Nikita Gale / INTERCEPTOR and DECENT
Artist Bio:
Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale's practice is often structured by long-term obsessions with specific objects and the ways these objects gesture towards particular social and political histories.
Acoustic foam, felt, audio cable, and music stands are materials Los Angeles-based artist Nikita Gale often employs to visually articulate the mechanics of sound and to point to the intertwined histories of politics and “the crowd.” Gale’s large, multi-part installations are also informed by the relationship between histories of protest and the urban landscape and, more recently, new theories about mass communication, social relationships, and listening. Gale’s work features familiar forms, such as crowd control barricades, that signify control and power; however, the artist reconfigures these items in new orientations which grant them new currency and meaning. Gale’s site-responsive installations consider the specific architectural features of a site, drawing our attention to the corners, the seams, the edges, and other interstitial spaces that are often overlooked but are integral to the structural foundation of the building.
As part of the exhibition In, Of, From: Experiments in Sound, we are included the installation INTERCEPTOR (2019–20). It is a work that adds a complex dimension to the idea of experimenting with sound. INTERCEPTOR departs from a nineteenth-century barricade design (based on an “ideal barricade” construction by Louis-Auguste Blanqui from his Manual for an Armed Insurrection, 1866). The work’s relation to sound is visual or metaphoric, because it is a soundless piece. According to Nikita, was a consequence of “thinking about the infrastructure of crowd control,” and she “became interested in the ubiquity of barricades at protests and other large public gatherings like concerts and political rallies. Barricades have origins in a very radical material tradition, having been made out of refuse by the working classes in nineteenth-century France to block and redirect the flow of street traffic as a means of protecting themselves against state violence. These structures also served as social spaces and ad hoc stages for these citizen insurgents to address one another. Through the advent of mass production and appropriation, barricades have now become a mobile architecture that controls how crowds and audiences are allowed to take up space; they are no longer technologies of “the people” but are now technologies of authority. The freedom to speak and to listen is negated by the physical control rendered by barricades’ presence.
For Gale, opaque refusal represents a parallel inheritance, passed down from protest movements and uprisings throughout history. In 1992, the Los Angeles uprising opened up a chasm amid the breakdown of civic discourse, public language and conversation—allowing a truer expression, consisting of action and destruction of property and bodies, to fill the streets: NO LANGUAGE, NO DISCOURSE. A generation before, the citizen insurgents of France took personal belongings from their homes and put them in the streets, blocking traffic, encrypting the city and rendering it unnavigable. This is how oppressed groups assert opacity and refusal.
I’m a descendant of systems of understanding the environment and systems in which the most valuable thing you have is your name.
The artist was named Nikita by her parents upon birth. She inherited a surname, which was not Gale. (“Gale” is a middle name several female members of her family on the maternal side share). The legal name which Gale refuses is the one by which she is identified by the government, by the system—capitalism and law. Gale’s disavowal calls out that name as a marker of state surveillance, exploitation, and oppression.
https://www.contemporaryand.com/exhibition/nikita-gale-descent/
Curricular engagements DESCENT: art and sounds, video art, rebellion, state surveillance, gender + LGBTQI studies, representation, institutional critique, African American history.
INTERCEPTOR considers exclusion and protection, radical expression, and how the regulation of space influences the regulation of speech and listening.
Curricular engagements INTERCEPTOR: art and sounds, rebellion, barricades, institutional critique, African American history.
For Gale, opaque refusal represents a parallel inheritance, passed down from protest movements and uprisings throughout history. In 1992, the Los Angeles uprising opened up a chasm amid the breakdown of civic discourse, public language and conversation—allowing a truer expression, consisting of action and destruction of property and bodies, to fill the streets: NO LANGUAGE, NO DISCOURSE. A generation before, the citizen insurgents of France took personal belongings from their homes and put them in the streets, blocking traffic, encrypting the city and rendering it unnavigable. This is how oppressed groups assert opacity and refusal.
I’m a descendant of systems of understanding the environment and systems in which the most valuable thing you have is your name.
The artist was named Nikita by her parents upon birth. She inherited a surname, which was not Gale. (“Gale” is a middle name several female members of her family on the maternal side share). The legal name which Gale refuses is the one by which she is identified by the government, by the system—capitalism and law. Gale’s disavowal calls out that name as a marker of state surveillance, exploitation, and oppression.
https://www.contemporaryand.com/exhibition/nikita-gale-descent/
Curricular engagements DESCENT: art and sounds, video art, rebellion, state surveillance, gender + LGBTQI studies, representation, institutional critique, African American history.
