"Sound Art: New Only by Name"

9-24-15
On September 10th I visited the exhibition “Sound Art: New Only by Name” in the Student Galleries South of the Jot Travis building at the University of Nevada.  Before attending the exhibition I also attend the discussion panel that took place in the Wells Fargo Theater in The Knowledge Center on campus.  The discussion panel focused primarily on the artists, and how they came up with the ideas for their work that is now being shown in the Jot Travis gallery.  This exhibition includes three pieces by various artists such as Jean-Paul Perrotte, Robert Morrison, Clint Sleeper, Tohm Judson, and Carol Burch-Brown, as well as many others who have helped to make this exhibit possible.  The primary curators for this show are Dr. Brett van Hoesen and Dr. Jean-Paul Perrotte.

The exhibition was set up to have three separate galleries by having three separate rooms in order to be able experience each sound art as an individual piece of art without the other pieces interfering with each other.  The first gallery consisted of a video playing of artist Clint Sleeper throwing dirt on a couple of guitars and drums. The title of this gallery is We Are Singing as Softly as We are Able. In front of the projection were a couple piles of dirt, two speakers, and a drum similar to the ones used in the video.  Also displayed in the first gallery is a gallery library in which visitors of the exhibition can read about other sound studies, and they can leave any comments or questions they have about the exhibit.  Next to the gallery library that is also on display is a television that plays a video of a project that was done a couple of years ago by Jean-Paul Perrotte and a friend of his in which they attached electrodes to a student’s head in order to see her brain waves on their computers.  Depending on what the student thought about her brain scans would change the music that was playing on Dr. Perrotte’s computer, which she is hooked up to, and therefore had created another way in creating sound art.  Also playing in headphones next to the TV are sound pieces students and other faculty members of UNR have created.  The second gallery of the exhibit contains a total of twelve bronze bowls that are lined up with six bowls on each side of the room.  One side of the room contains bowls that are struck at random by a solenoid and the other six can be interacted with by hitting them with the small mallet that was placed next to each bowl.  This gallery is called Structures in Microtonal Harmony and is a collaborative work by Dr. Perrotte and Robert Morrison.  The third and final gallery is an audio and video installation by Carol Burch-Brown and Tohm Judson.   The title of this video installation is Salt Marsh Suite.  This video installation and audio is information collected from Bird Island.  The gallery is set up so that the lights are off and there are two seats placed in front of the projection so visitors can be surrounded by the sound and video of the water, birds, and other sounds captured.  The projection itself is not projected onto a blank wall or a single screen, but it is projected onto three separate sheets of fabric that are slightly transparent in order to break up the image and give it a 3-dimensional feel to the work.  The video itself has been edited in a way that could give a whole new meaning to the purpose of the video and the point that the artists are trying to make.  At times, the colors of the images are inverted and/or another image is laid over it to where they almost blur together.  This gives the video a sort of eerie or uncomfortable feeling because we know that a marsh is being looked at and they are slowly disappearing, making the images seem like a ghost image.  Someday the marsh may no longer be there and something else will replace it.  For this particular gallery, it can be quite peaceful to listen to because the audio is all sounds of nature, from water tides to the animals moving around on land or in the water.   All of these sounds that can be heard are also shown on the screen.  At times it seemed as if the audio was separate from the video even though it was clear that what you are looking at on the screen is also the sounds that are surrounding you.

When I heard about this exhibition and that it would be combing music and art, my two favorite things, I was excited to go and see it and learn about what everyone was talking about since everyone else seemed to be just as excited about it.  When I finally got to see the exhibition it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, I don’t exactly know what I was expecting to be shown or the way it would be set up but what I saw was not it.  I still liked the exhibition very much but some of the works shown did surprise me at first.  The video of Clint Sleeper kind of surprised me, not just because I had him as a teacher for a class last year but because of what he was doing to those instruments and I know that he will experiment with almost anything in order to discover something new about art, I and many other classmates actually found it humorous to watch him throw all that dirt onto those instruments.  I had heard that many musicians that had seen Mr. Sleeper throwing the dirt on the instruments either cringed or just couldn’t watch, I myself am a musician but knowing Mr. Sleeper and that he probably wouldn’t use the most expensive or nicest instruments to throw dirt on, it did not have the same effect on me.  I don’t usually experiment with sound or think what sound different things make, whether they are made of the same material or completely opposite materials, so by going through this exhibition I learned that there is just so much to art, whether it is sound art, a video installation, or some other form of art, there is just so much that you can do with it, like how all those bowls were technically the same, they were made the same and are made out of the same material, and yet they each had a slightly different tone to them when struck by a mallet or the solenoid.