Sound Arts
2017 MFA Thesis Exhibition Published on the occasion of the 2017 4 From the Curator 18 About the School of the Arts Columbia University School of the Arts About the Sound Arts Program Sound Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition 6 Danielle Dobkin The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery 19 About the Curator Lenfest Center for the Arts 10 Ashley Grier Sound Arts Faculty April 23–May 21 Thank You 14 Gerónimo Mercado © 2017 The artists and Columbia University 20 About the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery Columbia University School of the Arts Sound Arts Program 632 West 125th Street 318 Prentis Hall New York, NY 10027 arts.columbia.edu/sound-arts March 12, 2017 Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s 1998 El Mexterminator at El Museo del Barrio, New York, was a life-changing, emotional event. I had just started working at the museum the year before. I helped Dear Graduating Artists, plan and create the dense installation, assist the artists, docented the per for mances, and responded to audience and staff as they I wound up being a curator for very simplistic reasons. I’ve always reacted to the work’s challenging, retro-futuristic, ethno-cyborg loved art: its power to move us. The right image, word, sound—speaks characters. It was both extremely difficult and very, very enriching. to our concerns and captures the very spirit of the moment. I’ll I can conjure the taste of Teresa Margolles’ 2002 Vaporization confess I’m really not sure where my passion comes from. at PS1. She filled a gallery with fog created from water used It wasn’t in my family. As a child, I spent hours copying parts of to wash corpses in Mexico City’s morgue. I can hear Janet Cardiff Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms from an oversized book. In high whispering in my ear from Her Long Black Hair, 2004, a Public Art school, I broke away from a class trip to New York to stand before Fund walk in Central Park accompanied by a Walkman and packet of Monet’s Water Lilies at MoMA, thrilling to the luminous surface. photographs. Nostalgia? Perhaps. I could keep going. There After moving to New York City, I was exposed to a much wider are so many art-going memories from various points over my life range. The East Village of the early 1980s was flooded by graffiti and of which I have excellent recall. They stirred my heart, moved me, neo-expressionist painting, and enflamed by the AIDS pandemic. and continue to feel very connected to me because they were It was a hotbed of aggressive, literate perfor mance, art, music, and of my time. social activism. At 2 am in 8BC, the short-lived after-hours club, Karen You, too, are of your time. Each of you hails from a different cor - Finley stood on a coffee table just a few feet away and ner of the world, and carries your own distinct constellation: your deliv ered a sing-song litany about a mother drowning her babies. language, approach, materials, influences, concerns, poli tics, and No one knew who she was, but we couldn’t take our eyes off passions. Gathered here together, it may seem a cacophonous of her. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sue Coe, Juan Sánchez, and David symphony, but it’s a beautiful snapshot of the state of the moment. Wojnarowicz were producing the impassioned, feverish imagery We’ll see that some day. that spoke directly to us, to our times. We saw them in our neigh- I know it’s a difficult moment. Change is scary and exhil a rat ing, borhood, talked to them at gallery openings or Exit Art, and read and the world seems poised on the brink of madness. But keep going. critiques in the Village Voice or East Village Eye. Someday you, like me, will have difficulty dis till ing your I travelled a bit, then I went to graduate school. I worked in a Soho hunger for contemporary art to 500 words. And then you, coffee bar and a printmaking studio. I was floored by the pre ci sion too, will know as I do that we are living rich and fortunate lives. and wit of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms spiraling around the Guggenheim ramp during her 1989 retrospective. The 1994 Felix Gonzalez-Torres retrospective at the Hirshhorn, in Washington, DC, with its optimistic Sincerely, light bulb strings, shimmering silver-wrapped candy carpet, and the indoor billboard installation of soaring birds was heartbreaking, Deborah Cullen presented right in the belly of governmental negligence. Curator
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Danielle Dobkin is a sound and installation practice, I investigate where sound becomes artist and composer from Philadelphia, PA. a physical matter; I’m interested in the She received a BA in Experimental Music and extreme upper and lower ranges of the Electronic Arts from Bard College where she frequency spectrum where sound is not only studied under Bob Bielecki, Marina heard but also felt. Rosenfeld and Richard Teitelbaum. Always in search of new ways to engage and interact My thesis, headspace, explores these ideas with sound, she works with modular through small, constructed resonant spaces synthesis, handmade circuits, and live where the audience is welcomed to place electronic improvisation, and creates their heads. An assortment of resonant interdisciplinary projects with dancers, cubes are suspended from the ceiling, each musicians, poets, and visual artists. with a uniformed exterior and a unique interior. Every cube is equipped with a transducer, which in turn transforms the box I see myself as a resonant body creating into a speaker. The work juxtaposes ideas of spaces of sonic architecture for where other public and private space and creates a space bodies may resonate. How can you create a of fluidity between the body and the sounds body within sound? How can you create a coming from within. Sound as a medium has sonic being that moves, breathes, and no barriers; neither light nor walls may block communicates: through you, to you, dances the passing of sound. By creating resonant around you and then engulfs you? Within my spaces through frequency and vibration, practice, sound becomes my physical, kinetic, headspace offers a moment to experience visual, and auditory medium. Like patchwork isolation and meditation. within modular synthesis, my sounds are built from the ground up, sculpted and woven (opposite page) together, then edited, tweaked, and tuned for The Lissajous Curve the space they are sounding. My work often A visual representation of sound through an oscilloscope hints at ideas of synesthesia and focus around concepts of isolation, spirituality, submission, solitude, and rebirth. At the heart of my work I create immersive environments, something that may be experienced rather than listened to passively. Through my
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headspace, 2017 Suspended Reflection, 2016 Wood, sound Plastic, wax Photo by Joel Jares Ashley Grier
Ashley Grier was born in North Carolina, think about labor, physical exhaustion, and and raised in South Carolina. She received consumption of commodities. Another her Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance concern of mine is questioning the notion from Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Grier of gaze, and the associated affects it might is an artist working in performance, video, inspire, specifically related to time and and installation. She lives and works in perception of labor. Who has access to the New York City. embedded language and what hierarchies are being enacted? I use the imagery, both literally and in an abstracted form, of fruit I was born and raised in the American South trees, jams, and cakes that I have nurtured and grew up with southern politesse and and created. Constructs of politesse and many of its linguistic manifestations. My palatability rooted in southern cultural childhood was spent learning the nuances iconography continue to be a source material of this complex social environment and for my work. Who is the work made palatable how to pivot from one world to the next for? How can palatability work to inhibit through language. A cardinal element of access? adulthood has been the negotiation of the relics existing in the languages and dialects of this region. I question them, investigate (opposite page) them, honor them, and in some cases, Black Madonna in Catholic Church canonize them. The merging of mythology Photo by artist and unvarnished truths, and how one can create an appropriate veneer for the other, fascinates me.
I have begun to integrate these ideas into my practice, and am raising questions about marginalization and agility within social structures—how one moves back and forth between disparate communities—and how languages and codes are required to participate in this social undulation. I also
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Still from Bath, 2016 Still from Matryoshka, 2017 Video, color, sound Video, color, cound Frame enlargements Frame enlargements 4 min 20 sec 15 min 21 sec Gerónimo Mercado
Gerónimo Mercado is a musician and sound In times of constant disruptive change and artist born in Spain to Puerto Rican parents. overstimulation, I feel that my practice as an He graduated from Berklee College of Music artist pushes to unify my growing set of skills, in Boston, studying music and film. He allowing me to create subjects that appeal to maintains a practice in film music and has the core of humanism and its many had screenings at the Tribeca Film Festival conditions. and elsewhere. I view interactivity as something tangible At Columbia University, he has studied with that involves the listener/viewer, and it is a professors Brad Garton and Miya Masaoka key component to my installations. This may in the MFA Sound Arts Program. include visual elements such as video projection mapping, kinetic sculpture, and His sculptures and installations are performance. Sound as a material figures exhibited in New York, Japan, Chicago, heavily in my work, and the dictates of time Puerto Rico, and Cuba. His work focuses on are a major component. I create work and the human interaction of the audience with strive to construct a direct connection his pieces, and within this context, he between audience and the art piece. For me, employs various media and technologies. the audiences’ engagement and interaction with the work is a kind of malleable material.
I explore concepts of individuality and the social and the psychological space; I think about and mediate emotions and inquisitive- ness of the viewers, their connection to their own core feelings such as embarrassment, desire, curiosity, and confusion.
(opposite page) Lumarca by Matt Parker, a new-media artist in New York, BAM Teknopolis Install, 2017
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K@lostrum, 2017 Mirrors, 2016 Cow milk, paint, found acrylic domes, video projection, Transducers, found acrylic domes, video projection, camera, computer, sound computer, sound About the Sound Arts About Sound Arts Faculty
School of the Arts Program,Columbia the Curator Director: Miya Masaoka Columbia University School of the Arts University School Deborah Cullen (PhD) is Director and Artist-Mentor: Spencer Yeh awards the Master of Fine Arts degree Chief Curator of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Adjunct Faculty: Ben Holtzman, Liz Phillips, in Film, Theatre, Visual Arts and Writing of the Arts Art Gallery at Columbia University David Sulzer and the Master of Arts degree in Film in the City of New York. While oversee ing Affiliated Faculty: David Adamcyk, The Sound Arts MFA at Columbia University Studies; it also offers an interdisciplinary the Wallach’s expan sion into the Lenfest Brad Garton, Terrence Pender School of the Arts is an interdepartmental program in Sound Arts. The School is Center for the Arts, Cullen has curated Visiting Critics: Degree Program offered in association with a thriving, diverse community of talented, Passages: Robert Blackburn (The David Maria Chavez, Julia Christensen, Jace the Visual Arts MFA Program, the Department visionary, and committed artists from C. Driskell Center, UMD-College Park, Clayton, Seth Cluett, Nicola Hein, Peter of Music, and the Computer Music Center. around the world and a faculty comprised 2014); Interruption: The 30th Ljubljana Kiefer, Pauline Oliveros, Andrea Parkins, DJ of acclaimed and internationally renowned Biennial of Graphic Arts (MGLC, Slovenia, Spooky, Elliott Sharp, Ed Osborn, Carsten Columbia University has been at the helm artists, film and theatre directors, writers 2013); and The Hive: The Third San Juan Seiffarth, Annea Lockwood, Keith and Mende of sound innovation for over fifty years of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, playwrights, Poly/Graphic Triennial (Puerto Rico, 2012). Obadike, Barbara London, Carol Parkinson, with faculty specializing in composition, pro du cers, critics, and scholars. In 2015, Previously, she served at El Museo Irene Moon improvisation, music theory, musicology, the School marked the 50th Anniversary del Barrio, NY, for over 15 years, where installation, sculpture, instrument building, of its founding. In 2017, the School opened pro jects included Caribbean; Art at the acoustics, music cognition, and software the Lenfest Center for the Arts, a multi-arts Crossroads of the World (Yale University Thank You development. Faculty from the Computer venue designed as a hub for the presen- Press, 2012); Retro/Active: The Work of Music Center, along with colleagues from tation and creation of art across disciplines Rafael Ferrer (2010, and Monograph by Miya Masaoka would like to extend sincere Composition, Visual Arts, and Engineering, led on the University’s new Manhattanville UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center thanks and gratitude to the many people who the development of the new interdisciplinary campus. The Lenfest hosts exhibitions, Press, 2012); Nexus New York: Latin/ have contributed to the lifeblood and vitality area in Sound Arts that leads to the Master per formances, screenings, symposia, American Artists in the Modern Metropolis of the Sound Arts program, including Carol of Fine Arts degree awarded by the School of read ings, and lectures that present new, (Yale University Press, 2009); and Arte ≠ Vida: Becker, Jana Wright, Matthew Buckingham, the Arts. global voices and per spec tives, as well Actions by Artists of the Americas Cy Morgan, Iliya Fridman, Christina Rumpf, as an exciting, publicly acces sible home 1960-2000 (El Museo del Barrio, 2008). Alexander Fuentes, Rich Dikeman, Ben Hagari, A deep engagement with sound as a for Columbia’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Pauline Oliveros, Gavin Browning, Tom Kalin, material and the employment of sound in an Art Gallery. Annea Lockwood, Kenny Wong, Douglas interdisciplinary context is a premise of the Repetto, Jon Kessler, Julie Rossi, Shelly Silver, Program. Visit arts.columbia.edu/sound-arts. Peter Clough, Jeff Snyder, Miller Puckette,
Stuart Hall, Giampaolo Bianconi, Susan Boynton, George Lewis, Zosha Di Castri, Nick Patterson, Risha Lee, Carrie Gundersdorf, Damon Holzborn, Laila Maher, Sarah Congress, Galen Joseph-Hunter, Julia Burgdorff, Keiko Reid, Andrew Hass, Alexander Barnett, Rider Urena, Luke Dubois, the Trenk family, Scott Koen and Joel Jares. 18 19 The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery advances Columbia University’s historical, critical, and creative engagement with the visual arts. Serving as both a laboratory and a forum, The Wallach Art Gallery offers opportunities for curatorial practice and discourse, while bridging the diverse appro aches to the arts at the University with a welcome broader public. We present projects that: are organized by graduate students and faculty in Art History & Archaeology or by other Columbia scholars; focus on the contemporary artists of our campus and communities; or offer new scholarship on University special collections. Established in 1986, The Wallach Art Gallery is the University's premier visual arts space. The gallery has presented critically accla imed exhibitions, and is a platform for a dynamic range of programming and publi ca tions that make lasting contributions to new scholarship. The Wallach Art Gallery also animates other university spaces as opportunity arises. Always free and open to the public, the Wallach Art Gallery operates in close relationship to the Depart ment of Art History and Archaeology, School of the Arts, and the University Libraries (particu larly Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library), which hold Columbia University’s collections.
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