Art Metropole

#13017

start very quiet and get very loud

Artists

Christopher Willes, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Christine Sun Kim

Date

2017

Publisher

8-11

Format

Artists' Books

Size

20 × 25 × 1 cm

Length

45 pp

Genre

Contemporary Art

Description

The publication start very quiet and get very loud brings together the work of an intergenerational group of artists, each considering a socio-political dimension of sound within public space and the space of the page. American artist Christine Sun Kim contributed a series of drawings which articulate an ambiguous and playfully poetic graphic language somewhere between musical notation and American Sign Language gestures. Born deaf, much of Kim’s work rethinks her relationship to the very nature of sound as a communication medium, redrawing notions of understanding, trust, and power in relation to audibility. In doing so she explores the notion of sound as a form of social currency.

Christopher Willes has contributed a set of three experimental graphic scores which play on traditions of “sonification” (the well practiced process of translating data into music which has dominated much of 20th century contemporary classical music). The scores are made in response to images of protest and police crowd control tactics, which the artist witnessed during the Toronto G20 Summit (2010), and the Montreal student uprisings (2012/13). Transposing the patterns of bodies within the images into the plane of musical notation, the scores produce a spatial choreography of sound on the page, and ambiguously suggest a further musical action to be determined by the reader.

Finally, the seminal Canadian composer, acoustic ecologist, and sound-walking pioneer Hildegard Westerkamp contributed a text which was originally written in 1995. In it she explores the psychological and political implications of sound on the listener within public space, and elaborates how normative gender paradigms might be entangled in how we listen, both to each other and our environment – a notion worth interrogating anew today.

Book design: Xenia Benivolski and Christopher Willes
Printing: swimmersgroup
ASMR video: Yuula Benivolski

Publication including works by Christine Sun Kim, Hildegarde Westerkamp, and Christopher Willes

Limited first edition (45 copies)

Softcover, perfect-bound with 4 inserts

Published by 8-11 Gallery December 2016, Toronto
Part of the exhibition “Every sound is a small action and broke world”

1. 
2. 
3.