OPEN ONLINE TWO

15 November 2011 – 14 November 2012

Artists

 

Sarah Boothroyd (Canada)
Desiree D’Alessandro (USA)
Moon Young Ha (USA/South Korea)
Anthoney J Hart (UK)
Wittwulf Y Malik (Germany)
Jessica Rowland (UK)
Adam Stansbie (UK)
Joe Stevens (UK)
Sue Tarbitten (UK)

Introduction

 

Fermynwoods is pleased to present 10 works by 9 artists who have created sound work through a range of multi-disciplinary methods, exploring diverse themes.

The selection was made by George Barber and Matt Davenport from 73 works submitted by 47 artists from all over the world. Sound based work was chosen as the discipline for our second Open Online exhibition as a natural continuation of our summer programme, as we explored sound through the Interchange and Encounters projects, particularly work by artists David Littler, Jason Singh and Simon Woolham (Interchange) and Paula Boulton, Rebecca Lee and Caroline Wright (Encounters).

This exhibition includes sound works – with and without visual elements – that manipulate and play with a range of source recordings; including media, oral history and field recordings, simple sounds that are used to evoke a powerful sense of place; alongside complex musical sound scores complemented by visual animations.

Artists Desiree D’Alessandro and Sarah Boothroyd have drawn from media and other text based sources for the inspiration and content of their work. D’Alessandro’s World Water Shortage vs Golf Course Consumption (2010, 00:03:12) is a personal environmental message concerning worldwide water shortage in the face of the rampant golf course industry in the USA, and was created by re-contextualising appropriated media recordings from popular culture. Boothroyd’s All in Time (2011, 00:25:00) is a complex narrative reflection on time itself – one of philosophy’s most prevalent themes – and created by editing oral and media recordings.

Moon Young Ha, Wittwulf Y Malik and Adam Stansbie are three artists who work as composers and have produced musical scores, either by using music production software or by manipulating recordings of sound fragments. Ha composed Amorphisms (2008, 00:06:00) as an emotive musical score that guides the accompanying sequence of images in a recurring colour palette by videographer Dennis Miller, whilst Malik’s electronic music score, interrupted by rolling thunder The Sound of Light – 7 Meditations (2009, 00:07:00), is accompanied by a single image whose colour changes with the drama of the music. Adam Stansbie’s Escapade (00:09:44) references Pointillist painting; at the start of the piece the fragments of sound are densely packed and heard simultaneously, as the piece continues the density dilutes and the sound fragments can be individually perceived.

Other artists manipulate field recordings as a source material to create their work. Jessica Rowland bridges composed sound with field recordings, as she edits the sound of the percussive nature of clicking flute keys into a rhythm of repetitive layers in Syncopation (2011, 00:01:43). Composer Anthoney J Hart’s A Temporal Interval (01:45:54) is a swelling audio work that plays with our sense of place, time and reality by referencing memories and emotions through his manipulation of field recordings of trains. Joe Stevens’ digital animation Thunder (2011, 00:11:29) was produced using open source processing software to visualize recordings of the sound of rain and distant thunder, whilst his second piece, Umm and that was quite nice (00:02:45), focuses on the gaps between words, taken from personal oral history recordings, to highlight the significance of pauses in providing structure to the narrative and portraying a strong sense of emotion.

Sue Tarbitten employed a new method of producing sound to create The Language of Cloth (2005, 00:02:20), which was discovered when the artist scanned open weave textiles into a computer. This digital ‘reading’ of the cloth through text was then complemented by recordings of textile machinery. Finding new methods of recording, manipulating and producing sound, suggests a continuing development of this relatively new, innovative and hybrid contemporary art form.

FCA would like to thank artist George Barber and artist and Head of Media Arts, Broadway, Matt Davenport for their assistance in selecting the artists for this exhibition.

Please click on the artists’ name further details about the work.