Layers and Loops, Overlaps and Digressions, 2018

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BACKGROUND
This project is located in the field of audio-visual crossovers of painting and sound. This debate is current in MOMA NY's curated exhibition Soundings 2013 and Hirschhorn Museum's Visual Music: Synaesthesia in the Arts 2005. Building on concerns of visual music, this installation work asks in particular: In what ways can the notions of cross-reference, memory and visual and sonic traces be interrelated in a site-specific painting and sound installation using compositional crossovers. The work also considers how non-objective painting and sound can be combined in installation to each to frame the experience of the other.

CONTRIBUTION
This work's contribution is to explore in both painted and sonic nonobjective forms in a complex interplay of compositional and procedural inter-relationships. Compositional processes were developed which allowed the develop of two series of paintings, one series primary and optically intense, the second series derivate and retaining traces of the process and touch of surfaces. A similar compositional framework was used to create a 3-channel sound composition audible in the room displaying the first set of paintings. A highly directional loudspeaker projected a 4th channel of sound into a second gallery space where the traced paintings were installed. Thus, while viewing the traced paintings, the sound beam shot from the distant room intersected audibly with the viewing/viewer's location as frame.

SIGNIFICANCE
I created this painting and sound work upon invitation for this exhibition curated by Dr Anne Mestitz across CAT and Moonah Arts Centre venues. As indicated in the exhibition title, the curation was designed as response to the lack of any contemporary context given in The Field Revisited (NGV Australia, 2018), and my research brings the issues raised in that re-run of a 1968 exhibition into a contemporary context. Significant non-objective artists included Ron Roberts Swann AM, Paul Zika and Stephen Wickham.