The Sound-Sweep
Julien Hackett / Sharon Phelan / Lesley Flanigan
Date: 5th June – 15th June 2010
Preview: 4th June 6 – 8pm
Monster Truck gallery & Studios is pleased to announce the first exhibition in its new Temple Bar gallery. The Sound-Sweep is a group exhibition that brings together three artists whose works explore the physical materiality of sound.
The title is taken from the 1960 short story by J.G. Ballard, where the main characters – Mangon, a sound-sweep and Madamme Giaconda, a former opera singer, conspire to have her perform again. Since the introduction of ultrasonic music, Madame Giaconda’s operatic voice has been rendered redundant. “After an audible performance of most symphonic music, walls and furniture throbbed for days with disintegrating residues that made the air seem leaden and tumid, an entire room virtually uninhabitable.” [1] It was Mangon’s job to vacuum these sonic residues.
The story offers an interesting twist on the resonating frequencies of materials and space as it lingers in the air, only audible to those with exceptional auditory powers. Madame Giaconda’s upcoming performance hints towards a sonic revival that may bring down the walls of a building as with the battle for biblical Jericho.
Leading up to a closing performance by Lesley Flanigan, artists Julien Hackett and Sharon Phelan will install recent work that challenges cultural binaries such as subject and object in favour of more interconnected and contextual frameworks through the use of sound. Both pieces use very low frequencies that are sculpted through mediums such as water, as in Hackett’s piece Question Concerning Heidegger, and the multiple bass drums and toms heard in Phelan’s Music for Drums and Bass.
To mark the closing of The Sound-Sweep Lesley Flanigan will perform Amplifications, a project for speaker electronics and solo voice. Approaching electricity as material that can be seen, heard, and touched, Flanigan builds her own wooden instruments out of loudspeakers and electronics, and then pairs the electric rhythms and tones of their feedback with the warmth of her own voice. In doing so, she sculpts a strange sonic atmosphere that includes noise, voice, the action of amplifying, and using speakers as something more than just a vehicle for sound.
Sharon Phelan
[1] Ballard, J.G. (2002) ‘The Sound-Sweep’ in The Complete Short Stories(London:Flamingo)
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