 Voice Figures James Peel, Nick Laessing & Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, Cara Earl, Iris Rennert & Oliver Friedli "Voice Figures" brings together work by artists Nick Laessing (Berlin), Cara Earl (NY), Iris Rennert (Zurich) James Peel (London) which reflects on the impact of sound. Wikipedia describes sound as a disturbance of mechanical energy, which is produced when a force causes an object to vibrate. Each of the works in this show, while formally and aurally different, (from live performance, silent images, and recordings) can be viewed in the light of this definition. Nick Laessing has drawn from the endeavors of Margaret Watts Hughes, who in 1885 invented the eidophone, a device that translated the vibrations of her voice into patterns on a glycerin-coated elastic membrane. It allowed her to paint with song. Laessing has assembled different pieces of domestic plastic tubing in order to create instruments which when performed through by the vocalist Esmeralda Condez-Ruiz recreate the experiments of Margaret Watts Hughes. These instruments reveal how the innate patterns in the voice can be visualized as distinct rhythms. The projection of the voice into the instrument causing an aural disturbance of the fine powder, which is held on a latex membrane stretched over the end of the instrument, agitating the powder into pronounced patterns and images. Cara Earl has been working on a series of drawings of famous orators captured mid speech, from figures such as Kim Jong Il, and Martin Luther King to Horace Greeley (who famously told everyone in the mid 19th c. America to go west) and Orson Welles. Earl has made one drawing a day over a period of time and each work is numbered by the date it was made. They reflect perhaps more on the natures of the repeated and imitated gestures of speakers who at times were attempting to convey very different messages. James Peel's work "Töne der Wasserfälle", was inspired by an essay written in 1874, by the Swiss geologist Professor Albert Heim. Heim argued in his paper "Töne der Wässerfälle" that there is a universal tone in moving water. The fundamental disharmonic chord structure that Heim considered he had revealed paralleled Beethoven's infamous disharmonic chord in his Pastoral Symphony of 1808. In response to the criticism he received for this apparent mistake, Beethoven replied that was what he heard in nature. Retracing Heim's steps with musician, Clem Pillai, Peel took sound recordings at the fourteen waterfalls mentioned by the professor, his findings then tested with tuning forks, producing a 12 inch record and photographic series. In an artificial landscape, Iris Rennert and Oliver Friedli are giving a view over pilled up speakers and iridescent CD-Roms. The collected sound recordings of waterfalls are dissected into grains and layered according to a new value system. In this way the data flow and the random basic structure of a water stream are generating a new aural landscape. Exhibition 24 February - 11 March 2007 view by appointment 076 347 17 11 K3 Project Space Maag-Areal (Swiss Prime Site) Hardstrasse 219 8005 Zürich Telefon +41 (0)76 409 84 43 www.k3zh.ch |
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