Collection Rotation: Meara O’Reilly Posted on May 11, 2009 by Suzanne
Once a month a local guest organizes lists, groupings, or ‘exhibitions’ from our permanent collection. Our wonderful guest this month is Meara O’Reilly, sound and visual artist, invited as timely accompaniment to our current LiveArt project, Mika Tajima and New Humans. Thanks to Meara for a truly AWESOME rotation. Enjoy.
———————————-
Resonance and illusion games: resonant frequencies of spaces, objects, and humans, and illusions that arise out of play.
In my own research, I try to find a disputable balance between scientific and subjective perception. I’m interested in the idea of learning as a beautiful physical experience or performance or even a game—creating a situation where individual perception of a piece can be as much a part of the process as the artist’s intent or an objective material-based truth.
Josef Albers stated this elegantly: “Experience teaches that in [visual] perception there is a discrepancy between fact and psychic effect.” I’d like to pair this with something of John Cage’s I read many years ago, where he talked about music as anything that improves audition (the process of hearing). To me, each of these statements poses a similar challenge—to create experiences that both trick and heighten our senses.
In the study of acoustics, every material or space has a set of resonances or frequencies at which it most easily vibrates. An opera singer’s high note shattering a glass may be an old wives’ tale, but the image is indelible. Sound becomes a new and heightened quantity, a visual and tactile event. In a film of a recent performance by the New Humans, a car resting on a sheet of glass is amplified and destroyed in the factory of its origin. Every strike of the sledgehammer and crack of glass is sonically fortified; the car sounds as though it is being dismantled by its own resonance.
To me, finding the resonant frequencies of an object or space is akin to creating a sound mirage of its dimensions. Auditory illusions also show us how we can perceive tonal information as something other than the sum of its parts. Illusions are, in general, experiences that arise out of bilateral symmetry (the fact that humans have a mirrored pair of almost everything—two ears, two eyes, etc) and the interactions or miscommunications that occur between halves. Our sense of spatiality and depth is entirely ruled by these pairs—finding our way in the dark, we calculate locations of obstacles by the different amounts of time the sound reflections take to reach each ear; when climbing a set of stairs the interactions between our eyes allow us to know the depth of the step we must take.
Many of the artists I have selected defy perceptual boundaries in some way, or use materials in a manner that demands a combined sense, or synaesthesia, of the perceiver. I tried to pick works that leap out of their medium or intended coordinates of perception: sculptures or spaces that beg to be sung into; paintings that shimmer or hover above canvas; bodies that just can’t seem to get comfortable; stereo-view photographs that coax our binocular vision into three dimensions. Then I paired them with musical compositions and practices that also ride along the boundaries of perception. Whether ‘playing’ scissors, or resonating the inner ear of the listener so that it actually begins to emit sound, these artists work in illusions. |
| Adolphe Braun, Oberland Bernois, Switzerland, n.d. |
| “How May Your Parents and Your Employer Help You In Your Cricket Career?” Chris Corsano, The Young Cricketer, FamilyVineyard 2008 |
All the old albumen print photographs are incredible to me, simultaneously tactile and ephemeral—ah, to be made out of egg white, and salt, and silver, and sunlight! They remind me of a recent NY Times story about a newly blind painter who wanted to paint again so badly he learned to tell colours apart by the weight of the various pigments in his hands. Chris Corsano’s drumming reminds me of that kind of dedication to the transmutability of materials. Without any amplification, overdubs or effects he seems out to find the resonant frequency of every object he touches, listening as much as he performs. I’d love to hear what the inside of this cave sounds like….
