If the elements could speak, what would they say? SEEING SOUND

September 27, 2024

If the elements could speak, what would they say? SEEING SOUND

2024: “Seeing Sound” is an expansive exhibition that explores the recent trajectory of sound as a dynamic branch of contemporary art practice, curated by Barbara London—one of the world’s most influential curators of new media art and the founder of the Video-media Exhibition & Collection Programs at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Museum: www.pratt.edu/exhibitions

The exhibition includes decomposing sound sculptures, audio-video installation, specialized listening devices, and the use of responsive technologies. The artists in the exhibition create environmental experiences, using sound as a sensorial and pliant material that enchants as an intangible but integral component of art and daily life. They incorporate this fluid medium into their experimental practices by working across disciplines and moving between music and composition, video and performance, sculpture and installation.

MORE: https://www.pratt.edu/events/seeing-sound-at-pratt-manhattan-gallery/?utm_source=hyperallergic&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=seeing-sound

If the elements could speak, what would they say? You can’t live without me, the water might remind us. You will return to me, says the land. Artist Jeffrey Gibson fields these and other vital messages in a new projection artwork making appearances at New York City landmarks, including the Brooklyn Bridge and Kimlau Square.

It is Gibson’s first project in New York since his participation in the ongoing 60th Venice Biennale, where he is the first Native solo artist to represent the United States. The project revives a previous work the Choctaw-Cherokee artist originally created for the 2021 Hudson Eye arts festival, where he presented 50 individual stationary signs featuring the same multicolored patterns and phrases across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge connecting Hudson and Catskill, New York. Gibson explained in a phone interview with Hyperallergic how in collaborating with Reich on the animation, he wanted to create a type of “heartbeat” that is both “seductive and calming” for viewers.