The
sonic-art exhibition "SoundWalk 2005" is back in Long Beach, offering
an intriguing variety of challenging treats for the ears.
Climb a small set of metal stairs, and a chorus of odd vocal sounds is
heard with each step. Approach a lectern and the action triggers
another voice, seemingly otherworldly. Sit in a worn swivel chair and
the word "is" booms from a speaker, the pitch and rhythm changing with
each repetition.
In San Diego-based artist Nina Waisman's installation, "Quinine," at Koo's Art Center in Long Beach, everyday objects lurk in mounds of
ankle-deep shredded newspaper, awaiting a visitor's approach. Enter the
installation and your presence draws reverberant sounds made up of
seemingly random words.
Waisman is among more than 60 emerging and established
artists who are part of "SoundWalk 2005," an exhibition of sound-art
installations at galleries, bookstores, apartment buildings and other
sites in the East Village arts district of Long Beach.
The music and lights of Eric Kabisch’s installation are activated
by the movement
of visitors within the circle. (Lori Shepler / LAT)
Presented by FLOOD, an area artists' group dedicated to
collaborative, multi-genre artistic experimentation, this second-annual
sound-and-visual arts event will run from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday in
the area encompassed by Broadway, Atlantic and Ocean boulevards, and
Elm Avenue. Some installations at Koo's, the Open bookstore, Utopia
restaurant and Seams clothing store will remain on display through
Sept. 7. Maps to installation sites will be distributed at Koo's and
other nearby locations;
"SoundWalk" showcases sound art in a way that is readily
accessible to the public, says artist and art historian Frauke von der
Horst, a teacher at Otis College of Art and Design and member of FLOOD.
"You have visual pieces with a sound component, and you have the
visual aspect of the site in which the art is integrated. So while
strolling through the neighborhood, you're doing so with all your
sensory perceptions: You smell the neighborhood, you hear it, you see
it."
There's a surprise factor, she said, in "something that you're familiar with being tweaked into something fun and exciting."
Von der Horst and fellow FLOOD members Kamran Assadi, Shea M.
Gauer and Scott A. Peterson curated the exhibition, which features
artists from the area as well as from New Zealand, Germany, Italy and
the United Kingdom. Proposals for the exhibition were solicited through
open invitation.
At Koo's, Orson Welles' voice emanates from a small,
weather-beaten wooden shack — Patricio Wolovich's re-creation of the
empty house that offers sanctuary to a character in Welles' 1938
broadcast of "The War of the Worlds." Wolovich describes it as a
tribute to Welles and to early sound entertainment.
In the gallery's darkened back room, Eric Kabisch's projections of
California landscapes flow around a circle of stretched nylon, its
lights and music activated by the movement of visitors within the
circle. Kabisch's sonic journey, he says, based on users' navigation
and interaction with the piece, looks at "the relationship between a
viewer of art and someone who becomes actively engaged in the
experience, and acquires authorship of it."
Robert Adam Malin, a native New Zealander and ex-U.S. Navy combat
illustrator, uses toys and the blended sounds of warfare and
Disneyland's ubiquitous "It's a Small World" anthem in a diorama called
"Small World," to make a point about terrorism and "the nature of
evil," he says.
"Being from New Zealand," he adds, "I feel it gives me a certain
freedom to explore what it means to be in America during wartime."
Nearby, at the Open bookstore, a wooden block installation by
Gauer and J. Frede will connect forest sounds with the turning of a
book's pages.
In the store's front window, pots of blooming cacti are hooked up
to speakers, allowing the plants to "listen" to recordings by 50 Cent,
Mozart and others. Over a two-month period, the artist, xtine, will
chart the plants' growth.
A collaborative work by Von der Horst and Assadi requires visitors
to enter a vacant apartment where they will hear recorded "ordinary
household sounds" echo in the emptiness.
Steve Roden, who has shown his sound and visual works
internationally, will improvise a soundscape over a five-hour period in
the "mysterious and convoluted" old ballroom of the former La Fayette
Hotel (now a condominium complex), reached via an entryway at the back
of the Open bookstore.
"You won't see me," he says. "It will be like 'The Wizard of Oz' — I'll be in a sort of nook not visible to people.
Through the positioning of speakers and seating, Roden intends to
create an intimate "space that's disconnected from the space we exist
in — a way of stepping outside of where we are. It's quiet and small to
allow people to notice it, as opposed to bonking them over the head."
Waisman's movement-activated piece, with its "pre-lingual,
primordial" intent, explores communication between humans and machines.
"I'm thinking of this as outside a language situation," she says,
"where things are more tactile and you don't know what's going to
happen.
"Yeah, it's a little scary," she adds, "but it's also playful."
Each visitor's perceptions of the installations will differ
because sound art, Roden says, is "so much about an interaction. I have
my own ideas, but I'm so much more interested in having people come
into the space and place their own meaning on it."
With sound art, "the rules aren't set. There's still room for surprise."
*
'SoundWalk 2005'
Where: East Village arts district of downtown Long Beach, encompassed by Broadway, Atlantic and Ocean boulevards, and Elm Avenue.
When: 5 to 10 p.m. Saturday; opening reception, 5 to 6
p.m. at Koo's Art Center, 540 E. Broadway; closing reception, 10 p.m.,
Basement Lounge, 149 Linden Ave. (B-100).
Price: Free
Contact: (562) 499-OPEN, soundwalk.org
