A Scintillation of Particles and Waves
A collaboration with Michael Graeve
WestSpace September 2016
The key conceit of this exhibition is that sound can fill a space, whereas painting cannot. This first collaboration between Leslie Eastman and Michael Graeve tests this idea. It does so by asking how may light transform space through colour, and how may sound transform the same space – invisibly – by becoming a projected volume that may be touched or felt?
We will present these parallel approaches to light and sound in a semi -darkened gallery at West Space using specialist directional acoustics and lighting. Using these complementary technologies, the artists will focus, radiate and reflect light, colour and sound-throughout the gallery.
Using a carrier-wave directional loudspeaker, one channel of a series of composed sound monochromes is experienced physically as a linear presence (imagine a sounding billiard ball reflected around the walls, with diminishing intensity). This acoustically-shaped space, though invisible, is literally felt by audiences as a charged modulated presence they travel through.
With directional lighting technology, a visible white light beam is programmed to channel across the gallery to radiate colour into the space from painted surfaces designed by the artists. Colour reflects into the space, emitting from the point of connection.
The resulting installation will be an immersive and durational encounter that reframes qualities and relationships of light and sound. Radiating and immersing, condensing and expanding, focusing and reflecting – these are metaphors for attention, looking and hearing. By distilling the mediums of light and sound the artists emphasise a physical and poetic dimension to these elemental aspects of experience. Sound may be made tactile, visceral and felt. Colour may be made to radiate directed light, foregrounding painting as a duration.
In this way the project builds on 25 years of these two artists’ shared conversations around the nature of experience – thus far realised across their parallel art practices- that explore the physicality of light, sound and embodied perception by creating spaces to reflect on reflection itself. The proposed new project develops these phenomena into a visceral manifestation where the pleasure of colour saturation and the felt encounter with sound are means to reflect on the visible and invisible cosmology of experience.
