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IN, OF, FROM: EXPERIMENTS IN SOUND
PRESS RELEASE
University Gallery
For Immediate Release
Contact:
ug@arts.ufl.edu
Writer: Mark Hodge
In, Of, From: Experiments in Sound
Dates: September 17-December 5, 2020
Artists: Cecilia López, Jules Gimbrone, Nikita Gale, Thessia Machado, Nao Nishihara, Adrian Piper, and Stevie Say and Lucie Vítková
Related Events:
Reception: No reception event due to COVID 19
Panel Discussion: September 23, 2020 (5:00-7:00 PM)
featuring Cecilia López, Jules Gimbrone, Nikita Gale and Thessia Machado
Moderator: Mark Hodge
Lecture: October 29, 2020 (6:00 PM)
Art and Dirt: Kim Gordon’s Aesthetics of Impurity
Branden W. Joseph, Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Columbia University
Virtual Gallery Tours: By appointment
Gainesville, Fla. —In, Of, From: Experiments in Sound is an exhibition that explores new ways of understanding the relationship between sound art and the traditional gallery experience. This exhibition will focus on a group of contemporary artists who have been experimenting with sound in their work. It is being organized in collaboration with artists Cecilia López and Jules Gimbrone. The exhibition intends to invite visitors to explore the connection between art and technology and seeks to introduce an examination of this connection that is especially apt in our current cultural context that is shaped by a dependence upon and an abuse of technology.
The works in this exhibition create a tension within the widely accepted practices of art display. They require the gallery visitor to rethink the specific temporalities and spatiality of the exhibition space with the goal of creating new dialogues in the academic context and wider art world. Primarily, the exhibition consists of four installations (known as “Scenarios”) designed by four artists. Each of these installations were specifically made for the University Gallery space and (due to COVID-19 restrictions) constructed entirely in-house.
Scenario 1:
Title: RED (d)
Artist: Cecilia Lopez
Date: 2020
Materials: speaker cable, speaker cones, piezoelectric microphones, drums
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 of a speaker-wire weaved net that holds 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 an instrument that resonates with the bodies of the drums.
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 (2016).
Scenario 2:
Title: Traps and Transmutations, 2
Artist: Jules Gimbrone
Date: 2020
Materials: Metal and plywood frame, microphone, sound cables, knives, cast soap, water balls, microphones cast in resin, a desiccated banana
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.
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.
Scenario 3:
Scenario 3 is composed of two individual works, entitled INTERCEPTOR and DECENT
Title: INTERCEPTOR
Artist: Nikita Gale
Date: 2019
Materials: Microphone stands, cables, metal studs
Gale’s large installations, such as Interceptor are informed by the relationship between histories of protest and the urban landscape and, more recently, new theories about mass communication, social relationships, and listening. This work features a crowd control barricade, which signifies authority and power; however, the artist has reconfigured this item with microphones and cables in an innovative sonic orientation that grants it new currency and meaning.
Title: DECENT
Artist: Nikita Gale
Date: 2019
Materials: HD video with audio
Decent is an almost nine-minute video in which a visual representation of the sound waves of an audio recording appears on a high definition screen. The recording, which can be listened to through headphones, features the artist discussing her relationship with her family and her family surname, which she no longer takes as her own, while music and assorted other sounds play in the background.
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.
Scenario 4:
Title: Contents
Artist: Thessia Machado
Date: 2020
Materials: laser-etched acrylic, audio players, audio tracks, headphones
Contents is an arbitrary and non-scientific system of transposing data gathered from a space into a sonic portrait of the gallery and its functioning. Two sets of numbers gleaned from the University Gallery space (e.g. year of founding, total square footage and number of outlets, lights) are input into a frequency generator. The resulting tones are then used to compose a sonic diptych that reveals the interactions between the pitches – frequency beating, cancellations and other interferences that make physical this abstract information.
Artist Bio:
Thessia Machado is a visual/sound artist, instrument builder, and performer whose work plumbs the materiality of sound and its effect on our shifting perceptions of space. She creates circumstances in which to mine the matter of her pieces for their innate physical properties and the sonic and visual relationships that can arise from their interactions. In improvised and composed performed works, the ensemble of things is augmented by a dynamically responsive and intentionally unpredictable human element. Electronics are almost always implicated.
About University Galleries
University Galleries is comprised of three art galleries that play an integral role in the teaching mission of the School of Art + Art History, College of the Arts at the University of Florida, as well as serving the entire UF and Gainesville community.
University Gallery (UG) UG’s primary mission is to provide the greater Gainesville community with a contemporary venue that explores new directions in visual art, incorporating historical perspectives as well. UG collaborates with myriad UF colleges, community and regional entities in creating a trans-disciplinary venue for artwork that is relevant to education at UF, and the greater north-central Florida region. Exhibitions feature nationally/internationally known artists, a studio art faculty exhibition, and MFA graduating thesis project exhibitions.
Gary R. Libby Gallery presents art exhibitions that are organized by graduate student curators, in conjunction with the director of the galleries, providing an opportunity for students to learn experientially about curation, exhibition design, and presentation, and visitors to view professionally presented shows that primarily feature contemporary art.
Constance and Linton Grinter Gallery of International Art presents exhibitions organized by graduate student curators, in conjunction with the director of the galleries that feature international and multicultural artworks. This venue allows graduate students to learn experientially about curation and exhibition design, and visitors to experience art and artifacts from across world cultures.
Parking Information
Daytime parking is available in reserved spaces between Fine Arts Building C (FAC) and Inner Road. From SW 13th Street, enter campus on Museum Drive. Turn right on Newell Drive, then right on Inner Road. Turn left into the parking lot behind FAC. The first three spaces on the left are reserved for gallery use. Parking permits are issued to gallery visitors in the University Gallery.
For more information, please contact the University Gallery at (352) 273-3000 or visit our website at www.arts.ufl.edu/galleries.
About the College of the Arts
The College of the Arts is one of the 16 colleges and more than 150 research centers and institutes at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. The College of the Arts offers baccalaureate, master’s and Ph.D. degree programs in its three institutionally-accredited schools — the School of Art + Art History, School of Music and School of Theatre + Dance. The college is home to the Center for Arts in Medicine, Center for Arts and Public Policy, Center for World Arts, Digital Worlds Institute, University Galleries and the New World School of the Arts in Miami. More than 100 faculty members and approximately than 1,200 students work together daily to engage, inspire and create. The college hosts more than 300 performances, exhibitions and events each year. Faculty and students also exhibit and perform at other local, national and international venues. To learn more, visit www.arts.ufl.edu.
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