Rhythm, Resonance, Reference, Removal and Refrain

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BACKGROUND
This project is located in the field of audio-visual crossovers, in particular in painting practice that refers to sound. This debate is current in MOMA NY's curated sound exhibition Soundings 2013, the Tarrawarra Biennial Sonic Spheres 2012 and scholarly texts like Hirschhorn Museum's Visual Music: Synaesthesia in the Arts 2005 and Vergo's The Music of Painting 2010. Building on the concerns of visual music, this work asks in particular: In what ways can the notions of time, duration, rhythm, memory, noise and interference and the spatial characteristics of musical works be represented in painting?

CONTRIBUTION
This work's contribution is to reference in painted form the complex experience of musical composition and listening. The overall arrangement of the paintings, while referencing a score, is built to develop a constellation of relations. In this way the experience of each painting is re-framed by its neighbours, emulating the way in which music unfolds as a series of events strongly held in relation through a narrative memory. The notion of memory is here rendered in the form of traces in each painting of other paintings: Paintings are used as stencils for each other, wet in wet, and the painted surfaces build up a history of cross-references to other works on display. The resultant complex surfaces in turn infer notions of noise and interference which implicitly reference my sound compositions, though these are not presented.

SIGNIFICANCE
I newly developed this major series of 15 paintings for the exhibition space and curatorial context of this curated exhibition. I was invited the exhibition's curator, Assistant Curator Dr Kent Wilson, and curation was overseen by Senior Curator Mardi Nowak. Town Hall Gallery Hawthorn is the peak public gallery space for the City of Boroondara. Significant artists in the exhibition included John Nixon who has exhibited at Documenta twice, and Dylan Martorell, who shows widely, and at Heide Museum.