Clicks & Whistles
The work is an installation of three kinetic sculptures and one work based on the sounds created by these pieces. The viewers’ interaction initiates a series of mechanisms that follow an electromechanical flow of events to a playful end. The three pieces: Clicks, Plucks and Whistles are gear driven audio sculptures. Conglomerate Communication, the fourth piece, is an individual audio experience that encourages and requires viewer participation. Through the practice of making my sculpture kinetic, I am creating a visual and audible performance. I am interested in the crude struggle that mechanical devices seem to generate when the fluid motion of the body is removed. There are slight indications of my involvement in the activation of the pieces. I have integrated plastic castings of my fingers into some of the mechanical operations that send the sculptures into motion. This motion is only achieved through viewer participation. The viewer becomes an essential actuator in the installation. The audible parts of the sculptures operate in two sound spaces. One, being the gallery space with the noise of the motors, gears and compressed air. The other is a more personal sound space where I have chosen to block the ambient noise of the gallery by the use of isolation headphones and only amplify specific parts of the sculptures. I am interested in the complex variations of noise or low frequencies, not readily heard, that are created by the sculptures. These frequencies are not heard in the gallery space without amplification. Just as most of the devices or machines we use in our daily lives produce noise or frequencies we either cannot hear or just plain ignore. I have presented for the viewer a more intimate sound experience that becomes a new composition created from the inner workings of these pieces.
Bio: With my background in drafting, machining processes, and general mechanical intuition, I am able to intuitively create and manipulate raw materials from their base state into sculptural form. In my current body of work, I relate the body as a system that needs to be supported in today’s progressively hostile surroundings. I am questioning whether technology can mitigate the environmental degradation that human-life has created in the name of progress and industrialization. Will humanity be able to sustain our biosphere and consequently will our biosphere be able to sustain the human race if we continue in the direction we are currently headed? By making these antiquated support systems that are aesthetically referencing the design of early 19th century industrial machinery I hope to recall the sense of industrialization and the beginning of our environmental degradation.
