Ambitious exhibition immerses visitors in sound

Wall of Sound | Ambitious new exhibition immerses visitors in sound.
25 April – 20 June, 2010
Marco Fusinato (AUS), Ann Lislegaard (DEN), Clinton Watkins (NZ), Richard Francis (NZ)

Exhibition Opening: Saturday 24 February, 2pm
Playing live at the opening: ¡Recurde!, Clinton Watkins, Richard Francis

This month Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts adds to its track record of ambitious installments with Wall of Sound, an exhibition consisting entirely of large-scale sound projects by local and international artists.

Wall of Sound groups together four artists who in individual ways approach sound as an artistic medium. The works vary from subtlety subdued audio experiments to highly immersive sonic installments which will be housed within architecturally modified gallery spaces.

The title Wall of Sound derives from a music production technique developed for pop and rock music in the 1960’s in order to generate recordings that played well on early analogue systems. Developed by the controversial American record producer Phil Spector, this technique required a large amount of layering in the recordings in order to produce dense, reverberant sound on mono AM frequencies. In the context of the exhibition, the title seeks to capture the artists’ attraction to heavily layered, analogue sounds which evoke physical spaces.

A key figure in the exhibition who explores sound/ image combinations is Auckland artist and musician Clinton Watkins. To produce the work the artist collaborated with sound engineers in order to customise mixing devices that translate sound pitches into video-based fields of colour. Wall of Sound Curator Stephen Cleland states ‘the resulting artwork functions like a giant abstract painting that is constantly regenerated by sonic textures. Large fields of bright colour are projected into the gallery which directly correspond with the minimal tonal sounds experienced in the space.’

Public Programmes Coordinator Renée Tanner adds: ‘This is the first time Watkins’ sound based experiments are incorporated into a gallery rather than their typical music venue setting’.

Another immersive work is by Denmark born artist Ann Lislegaard. In this ambitious installment, Lislegaard completely blacks out Te Tuhi’s largest gallery and fills the space with a multi-layered soundtrack. As the title of her work suggests, Science Fiction_3114 appropriates soundtracks from significant twentieth century science fiction films including Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972).
Cleland states that the effect is ‘like walking into a cinema with the projector turned off. Witnessing the sounds in a pitch black room makes viewers highly aware of every minute detail in the soundtracks. The sounds seem to physically alter your relationship to your immediate surroundings and in turn we become aware that sound affects us at much deeper levels than the images when viewing films.’

The exhibition runs for two months and is a rare opportunity to experience such a range of top sound artists.

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