SOUND I
Richard Garet & Crystal Z. Campbell

July 19 – August 12, 2016

Cindy Rucker Gallery is pleased to present SOUND I, the first of two exhibitions that explore contemporary artists using sound as a medium to create work.

The Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo in his 1913 manifesto Art of Noises proposed that sound was self-referential and music stood still and had become self-occupied, while everything that happened in life had advanced into the modern world. Contemporary sound artists seek to 1 push the aural experience towards an ever-expanding range of subjects through innovative compositions, sampled environmental sounds, acoustic manipulation, and contextualized
narrative works.

Crystal Z Campbell is an interdisciplinary artist that seeks to fuse historical narratives with
contemporary issues. Her piece, Living on Hope for a Long Time (2013), is adapted from the Jonestown Massacre. Based on direct transcripts from the Death Tape—a notorious cassette recording in which the cult leader made his final plea to his nearly 1000 American followers to commit suicide, Jim Jones’ words are vocalized by classically trained opera singer Jennifer Connor. Shown as a pair of headphones dangling from the ceiling, this simple visual underlines the grim history of its original purpose and invites the audience to focus on the purpose of the words. This testament to the failed multicultural utopia is a question about the politics of listening.

Richard Garet interweaves various media including moving image, sound, expanded photography, and multimedia performance. Garet's pieces seeks to invert the normative function of extraneous noise and bring it into the conscious state. His piece Meta (2013) is a sonic construct intended for ear-to-the-wall-listening. Using the chalky drywall and often hollow interior as an acoustical device, Garet invites his audience to experience the piece aurally and physically by placing their ear against the wall in an investigative action. Garet’s original composition is derivative of our own experiences, actions, and choices. They become emitted by commodities, means of communications, and our own relationships with technology. In Garet’s Perpetual (2015) series, the artist focused on background noise to create sonic constructions and subsequently translating each piece into a moving image generating a chromatic visual landscape. Removing the sound, Garet draws attention to the processes of perception, which activate sensorial, physical, and psychological phenomena that reflects on the nature and experience of time.

Crystal Z Campbell (b. 1980, Missouri) is a US artist of African-American, Filipino and Chinese descent raised in Oklahoma. Campbell's works have exhibited internationally: the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Philadelphia, Artericambi (Italy), Artissimma (Italy),Studio Museum of Harlem (NYC), Futura Contemporary Art (Czech Republic), Res (Iceland), Children's Museum of San Diego, Project Row Houses in Texas, Exit Art (New York), Art Rotterdam (Netherlands), de Appel Arts Centre (Netherlands) and Current: Los Angeles Biennial, amongst others. Honors and awards include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten; Van Lier Fellowship at Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program; Sommerakademie Fellowship at Zentrum Paul Klee; Mondriaan Fellowship; Europees Keramisch Centrum (EKWC); Marfa Contemporary and Yaddo. Campbell is a recipient of the 2016 Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

Richard Garet (b.1972, Montevideo, Uruguay) Richard Garet holds an MFA from Bard College. Recent projects include Midnight Moment, a site specific work created for the electronic billboards of Times Square, NY; Meta-Residue: Input Material, Space, Studio 10, NY; Theorem: You Simply Destroy the Image I Always had of Myself, Maná Contemporary, NJ; International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Cartagena, Colombia; Bioderivas, Museo de la Naturaleza y el Hombre, Tenerife, Spain; Queens International, Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York; Soundings: A Contemporary Score, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Extraneous to the Message, Julian Navarro Projects, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (Macba), Barcelona, Spain; and El Museo del Barrio, NYC. His sonic constructions have been published through sound art labels such as 23five, And-Oar, Non Visual Objects, Winds Measure Recordings, Unframed Recordings, Con-v, Leerraum, white_line editions, obs, line imprint, and contour editions.