PRINTArt show is music to our eyes
“Visual Sounds” is instrumental in bringing out modernism
Steve Remich
Karsten Ewald of the Columbia Art League admires Windchime, a mixed media piece on display at “Visual Sounds,” by Columbia artist Angie Ellegood. “It just begs to be touched,” says Ewald.
February 1, 2007 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Don’t expect paintings that break the sound barrier, but do expect art that breaks the norm. The Columbia Art League’s current show, “Visual Sounds,” features 50 selected works of art, ranging from oils and watercolors to manipulated digital photography to hanging mobiles to sound installations — and every medium in between.
The only prerequisite? All the entries must relate to or draw their influence from music, sound or both. The innovative exhibit brought out the unconventional in local artists.
What: “Visual Sounds”
When: Through March 9, Tues. - Sat. 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
Where: Columbia Art League, 111 S. Ninth St.
Cost: Free
Call: 443-2131
443-8838
Player, a mixed media piece by St. Louis artist Cindy Royal, is being exhibited at ...
On display through March 9, the gallery’s assortment adds another layer to the Columbia Art League maxim that “art is for everyone.”
The audio-influenced theme, conjured up by the exhibition committee nearly a year ago, is a perfect fit for the gallery, says Karsten Ewald, the league’s interim executive director. “We got more nontraditional work with a more modern feeling.”
The show’s winners, chosen by guest juror Victoria Weaver from the Daum Museum in Sedalia, are all paintings of individuals or groups playing music. Some entries sound the alarm for a move to the modern.
This is one of the few shows at the Columbia Art League to include pieces that hang from the ceiling, Ewald says. The first mobile pays homage to classical music. In Vivaldi’s Sonata by Sonya Nicholson, 20 origami cranes folded out of sheets of music hang from a gold-leafed frame. The second, Angie Ellegood’s Windchime, takes a quirkier approach.
Ellegood, a fiber arts student at MU, created the mobile for a course in her major. Using a variation of a technique called knotless netting, she wove wooden spools, metal washers and buttons into her mobile.
What began as an experiment in new materials turned into a perfect piece for the art league.
“I got so many comments on the fact that it looked like a wind chime that I thought it might be well-suited for the ‘Visual Sounds’ show,” she says.
While Ellegood’s art hangs from the ceiling, Cindy Royal’s figures cling to their instruments. Royal of St. Louis has two works on display — both multimedia and arguably the most unconventional visual art in the show. The theme was the perfect fit for Royal: The majority of the soon-to-retire DJ’s artwork is influenced by her lifelong relationship with music.
Her Player is a sculptural piece depicting a figure reminiscent of a witch riding or playing a violin that’s nearly twice its size. “It’s not the way a violin is played, but that’s the way he’s playing it,” she says, laughing. In Birdlegs, Royal explores a similar theme. The framed, 3-D piece features a metallic bird perched on, or playing, a green recorder. Royal created her second entry specifically for “Visual Sounds.”
One entry strikes a less visual chord. Electro-acoustic composer Jean-Paul Perrotte submitted to the show what he considered the most visual of his soundscapes, an installation titled Pankow/Schönhauser Allee 2004. He composed the piece to be heard in surround sound, but it plays in stereo due to the equipment available at the art league.
Perrotte, a visiting faculty member at the University of Iowa and Columbia resident, composed the piece while living in Berlin during a few months in 2004.
Living in the east side of Berlin, he often rode the subway line out to the last stop, he says. Using a portable minidisk, Perrotte made a recording on the train between Pankow and Schönhauser Street while on the trains and waiting at the stations. He then layered the recording with real sounds and synthesized sounds composed on a computer using the recording from Berlin’s urban, mechanical sounds as a base.
The finished product runs just over 10 minutes and offers an audio unique to his time and experience in Berlin.
Through this soundscape, Perrotte puts music to the typical experience of a foreigner living abroad. “It just didn’t sound like home,” he wrote in a statement on display with the installation.
When he listens to the piece now, it transports him back to his time in Berlin, he says. But in Columbia, Perrotte’s soundscape combines with the hum of visitors to create an improvised soundtrack for the gallery.
Within our country, artists drew inspiration from subjects as far and wide as jazz great Wynton Marsalis and late, legendary rocker Buddy Holly. Some subjects hit closer to home. Local artists based pieces on nature’s sounds at Rock Bridge Memorial State Park and the Katy Trail. The show’s artistic spectrum is just as diverse as its subject matter; the show emits a soundtrack for life.
— Sara morrow
