Ghent, NY-Sunday, July 21 (opening) through October 31, 2002. Challenging the very idea of sculpture being something that takes up physical space, the "Sound in the Landscape" exhibition at The Fields Sculpture Park at the Omi International Arts Center invites a new way of experiencing an outdoor art show. The seven installations making up the show shape sound as if it were a physical object, use sound to change our perception of space, play with our experience of time while viewing art, and challenge the very notion of what a sculpture is. Admission is free; driving directions can be found at www.artomi.org.

The sound works themselves, by Mary and Bill Buchen, Jeffrey Lependorf, Mathew McCaslin, Jeff Talman, Paulo Vivacqua and Joshua Selman range from physical constructions that produce sound, to works that exist only as sound. Throughout the exhibit, sound will travel along water, across the grass, and from up in the trees. Visitors will have the opportunity to experience the environment around them altered in unexpected ways: Are these sculptures? Pieces of music? Exactly which sounds were recorded live, digitally fabricated, or simply occurring naturally in the environment? Expect to be challenged, delighted, and surprised.

The "Sound in the Landscape" show represents the second of a series of exhibitions called "Ignoring Boundaries," which attempts to expand our understanding and definitions of sculpture by using media not normally associated with work in an outdoor sculpture park. This show has been co-curated by Peter Franck and Kathleen Triem of The Fields, and Jeffrey Lependorf, Director of the Music Omi International Music Residency program. Music Omi invites a diversity of sound artists from around the globe to come together each August for an intense session of active collaboration. This collaboration between The Fields Sculpture Park and Music Omi capitalizes on the rich resources accumulated amongst the two partner programs of Omi.

Omi International Arts Center, a non-profit organization, comprises a residency program for international visual artists, writers and musicians, and The Fields Sculpture Park, a year round public exhibition space for contemporary sculpture. Omi is guided by the vision that creative work is a vehicle for knowledge and understanding that transcends political and cultural boundaries. To this end, Omi has hosted over 400 residents from 50 different countries to date. Located two and a half hours from New York City in the hamlet of Omi in West Ghent, NY in the Hudson River Valley, Omi is situated on 250 acres of rolling farmland with spectacular views of the Catskills and the river valley.



The following artists have been invited to create works for the exhibit:

Bill and Mary Buchen,
Parabolic Bench"

Mary and Bill Buchen
This site specific sound installation team have produced numerous works for outdoor environments. They will show one of their pre-existing works, which produce sound or enhance the experience of listening without the use of electronic intervention. These works include "Aquaphones" (long tubes that lead from a pond to where a listener can place their ears to hear the sound of the pond amplified) and a variety of sculptural harps played by the wind.

Jeffrey Lependorf
His sound installation work, in collaboration with artist Luca Buvoli, has appeared most recently at The Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Queens Museum. For this exhibit he will present "Fountain." This work will takes the simple right-left stereo speaker pairing relationship and turns it own its side to create a "fountain" of sound. The work consists of recordings of dripping and flowing water, and incorporates other found aural objects. The title, which includes the quotation marks around it, suggests both the virtual nature of this aural fountain, as well as the specific reference to Duchamp's famous readymade.

Mathew McCaslin
Mathew is an artist showing at the Sandra Gering Gallery. "Art has a long history of investigating the world and renewing the way we look at it. Sculptor and installation artist Matthew McCaslin does just that by recasting our wired-up world of electrical outlets, underground cables and transcontinental power grids as a living circulatory system. His suggestions of a bodily kinship to the electrical network sneak up on you as you wander across floors spilling electrical cable like blood, past flexible conduit nesting like ganglia, and video screens throbbing with fecund images while listening to the brain-wave white noise buzz of radiant beds of florescent lighting. It's a little like walking through the entrails of a building still crackling with life."- Susan Geer

Atsushi Nishijima


Recommended to Art Omi separately by Koan Jeff Bysa and Robert Morgan, Mr. Nishijima is a versatile installation artist and performing sound sculptor, having recently appeared at Location One and the Knitting Factory in New York. He also created a well received installation in the exhibition opened at the New Museum of contemporary art as part of the Rollyhollyover exhibit of John Cage at the Guggenheim Soho museum.


Joshua Selman
Joshua Selman lives in New York, showing internationally. Among his projects are sound sculptures for radio broadcast and conceptual objects for record distribution. For 'Sound In The Landscape' Joshua contributes 'Listening Points,' a concept-soundwork for points on a map. About it he says "A map is provided for those wishing to find their way back to OMI." In a 1998 ABC Radio commission 'Mechanical Echo For Twenty Thousand Radios,' Joshua recorded hundreds of artists toiling on the border of civilization in Australia. His response as an invited sculptor to the international art event, Contruction In Process: The Bridge, organized by Richard Thomas (a resident artist at Art Omi this year.) Broadcast nationally months later, the mechanized echo of laboring artists flooded thousands of Australian radios. In '97 Joshua released 'DJ GLOVE Tuning' through Flux Records, NYC. "For Tuning I needed a hardcore progressive techno label to agree to a challenge - a 12 inch vinyl DJ release only containing a recording of a woman tuning a piano." The project is roundly reviewed by NPR, New Musical Express, Wire Magazine and many more documented at http://www.thing.net/~glove/tuning.
Joshua Selman is represented by Lance Fung. More on Joshua Selman: http://www.zingmagazine.com/zing12_staging/zing12/reviews/reviews-38.html,
Gallery:
http://www.lancefunggallery.com

Jeff Talman,
The Distance of the Discreet Voyeur
2001

Jeff Talman

Jeff works with objects and architectural spaces, recording them, processing the sounds and playing them back to make physical spaces into aural objects. Images of past work can be found at www.jefftalman.com. He proposes "a site-specific sonic installation that will investigate the nature of sound in defining space which is exclusive to the site selected in the sculpture park. Sonic feedback of local resonant sounds is of key interest. These sounds might originally issue from the landscape and may include resonant frequencies extracted from plant, animal or insect sounds; geographic sounds (earth tremors, rock slide); from local (in-landscape) structures such as the silo; or local weather sounds - rain, thunder, wind."

Paulo Vivacqua

Paulo Vivacqua

This Brazilian sound artist works with matrixes of tweeters (the small treble components of speakers) to create intimate landscapes of sound that the listener must experience at very close range. The materials heard through the speakers range from samba rhythms recorded in the favelas of Brazil to musical phrases of 2nd Viennese School composers to electronically produced sounds. His work can currently be experienced at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York, as part of a collaborative installation with the artist Tunga.

Matthew McCaslin
The Mystery of Things
Black light bulbs, aluminum cart, electrical hardward
69 x 48 x 19", 2001

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