Monster Truck Gallery and Studios with 126 present:
f o r m - r e f o r m - t r a n s f o r m
Works by Sarah Dunne
Curated by Sharon Phelan
Venue: 126, Queen Street, Galway
Dates: Thursday 15th-31st October 2009
Opening reception: 15th October 7-9pm
“Space is always an open space, we are those who close it.”
– Giancarlo Toniutti
form-reform-transform is the first solo exhibition of works by Irish artist Sarah Dunne. With a background in music, Sarah’s practice has been continuously questioning the relationship of sound to the object and the spatial experience of sound. While art and music have closely coincided for centuries, the boundaries between these fields are becoming increasingly ambiguous. In exploring the architectonic possibilities of sound in space, Sarah’s installations and drawings give voice to an acoustic presence, challenging sculptural, architectural and perceptual definitions of space.
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Curatorial Note
In the introductory notes to Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges lays out four principles for writing great literature: “the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time and the double.” [1] While described in writing, Borges’ world of Tlön in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and the city of Zaira in Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, manage to seamlessly cross over into the world of the reader. Yet neither writer provides a detailed account of these two places. Instead, small fables emerge from interweaving narratives, offering far more insight than a snapshot description. For Calvino, the city consists of “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past.” [2]
This tension between the present and the past epitomises the experience of Sarah Dunne’s work Untitled. The work consists of live, pneumatically generated tones, layered with recordings of past performances in various spaces. This layering and relaying of different sonic spaces, woven with the live sounds that surround the listener, describe a space not by its immediate descriptions and measurements, but through sound and its psychoacoustic presence. We can hear the rooms of the structure’s past, creating, in Sarah’s words ‘a ghost architecture’. This is further supported by the ghost-like appearance of the work, despite its solid structure. Here, we see a work within a work, where space is described aurally through recordings, which in turn aurally describe the present space. As these sounds emerge from the structure – somewhat resembling a voice – we become aware of how sound and space co-exist.
Such territory is characteristic of works by composers of the 60’s and 70’s, who were interested in sound as a physical medium and relational phenomena. One particular instance is the work I Am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier. The score consists of a paragraph to be read aloud, recorded and replayed repeatedly. By describing the content and overall form of the piece simultaneously, when performed, it unfolds as a gradual musical process, drawing attention to the potential of architecture as an instrument.
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech… [3]
Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room along with Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain are both examples of what Reich calls ‘process music’ [4], the influence of which can readily be heard in Sarah’s Concerto for Horn and Drainpipe. Radio samples scramble in and out over bass tones, imitating each other in a musical canon. As they fall in and out of phase, notions of linear time disappear. A conversational effect emerges from a relational dialogue adopted by the sounds, producing a sonic Babel. The fluid lines of the pipes and horn create a visual concerto of sorts, re-emphasising the sonic aspect of the work and highlighting the potential materiality of sound. Similar to a great writer creating worlds within words, Sarah blurs distinctions between past and present and shifts our understanding of space and time by drawing lines with sound.
Sharon Phelan
[1] Borges, Jorge Luis (1970) Labyrinths (London: Penguin)
[2] Calvino, Italo (1979) Invisible Cities (London: Picador)
[3] Lucier, Alvin (1995) ‘Interviews’ in Reflections, Ed. Gronemeyer, Gisela and Reinhard Oehlschlägel (Köln: MusikTexte)
[4] Reich, Steve (2002) Writings on Music (NewYork: Oxford University Press)
