From June 1-June 22, a new sound sculpture called Cascade Flow is included in If Not a Note, a Chasm at Site II (33 New Broad St), the launch exhibition of Jenn Cacciola’s new curatorial project, Neptune in June. Site I is at MapSpace and features two older works, Spectral Dust (2017) and Marsyas, Supplicant (2015)
Cascade Flow was conceived of in dialogue with early artworks like Cold Fracture Dust, Opus Conscientia and artworks combining the (for lack of a better term) “colors” black and brass. However, I introduce to this artwork the use of what I think of as a “sound field”. Each tetrahedron plays sound at a different height, creating a spatial quadraphonic experience.
The sound itself resembles an alien sort of breathing designed to enhance the sculptures uncanny, quasi-human presence. The use sound becomes a way to emphasize the time-based experience of this 3D sculptural artwork; the viewer, engaging with this sonic environment, enters into the flow of the sound. In that sense, Cascade Flow embraces flux, motion and transition. So much of our everyday lives depends on illusions of stasis, certainty and stability. While these things have their role and provide comfort in an otherwise chaotic universe, Cascade Flow proposes a speculative experience: what if, rather than embracing the noble lie of stasis, we embraced the flux of time, where meaning is constantly evolving, destabilized and yet perhaps somehow more “true”?