In Resonance

Bumbershoot Arts Festival, Center on Contemporary Art, On the Boards, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle
Curated by Fionn Meade and Rob Millis
August—September, 2005

Download the PDF: In Resonance

A month-long series of programs, performances, and exhibitions co-curated with Rob Millis, In Resonance looked at the state of sound-based art practices and included a group exhibition at Bumbershoot Arts Festival, an evening of live performance at On the Boards, a site-specific installation at Center on Contemporary Art, and a panel on sound-based art practices at the Henry Art Gallery. August-September, 2005

Contributing artists, critics, and performers included: Climax Golden Twins, Christoph Cox, Jim Haynes, Eyvind Kang, Jesse Paul Miller, Thurston Moore, Steve Peters and Christine Wallers, Steve Roden, Marina Rosenfeld, Toshiya Tsunoda, Stephen Vitiello, and Jennifer West.

Marina Rosenfeld, As Now, Is Now, 2005, Installation, dvd and multi-channel audio score, video still

In Resonance catalog excerpt:

When the innermost point in us stands
Outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
Side of air.
–Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps Max Neuhaus is accurate in declaring ‘sound art’ “has been consumed,” merely a trendy term for almost any contemporary artwork that incorporates sound. While his incisive, albeit over determined, assessment will and likely should continue to guide critical discussion of the resurgent interest in this field of contemporary art, In Resonance brings together artists who consider sound as primary to their work—artists who, in other words, employ a sound-based practice. And while their aesthetic backgrounds vary widely –music composition, sculpture, architecture, film and video, punk rock, noise, drawing and painting, and phonography—the contributing artists share elements of practice: creating and collecting a personal catalogue of sounds; recording, conflating, and/or performing arrangements from their own index of sounds; and acute consideration of how sound will be presented and experienced through a given work. This last shared tactic, taking a highly personal sound-based practice and translating it into ‘spatially-existing’ works of art—a ‘most practiced distance’ in Rilke’s phrase—aptly describes the focus of In Resonance on works that inhabit and animate space.

Stephen Vitiello, Fear of High Places and Natural Things, 2004, 9 10” speakers suspended, audio frequencies, courtesy the artist

Left: Steve Roden, Transmission Sketch, 2005, Pencil watercolor on paper, 8.5” x 11”, courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles
Right: Jesse Paul Miller, The Indeterminable Obsolescence of a Once Inscrutable Fact, 2005, 38 x 43 x 18, found object, sound. Photo: Linda Peschong