Return to the Everywhere

Vertical Slice, our contribution to the group show Return to the Everywhere at Chicago’s Weinberg/Newton Gallery, is an amalgam of parts—surfaces, sounds, and shells.  Centered around a pair of turntables whose tonearms are tied to one another, a gentle tug of war creates a looping sonic experiment of melodic and poetic audio. The sound from both records transmits to a portable sculpture. Gallery visitors were encouraged to move the sculpture (and thus the audio) throughout the exhibition. For us, there was an urge to produce something tactile and touchable, something that made an audio/visual experience hand held; objects who ring in tandem like low-hanging fog. We wanted to make the air itself a surface by ways of creating a physical experience through music. The turntables were flanked by soft “image sculptures”, large-scale floorworks featuring printed imagery and sculptures of various materials. The dualistic nature of these pieces reiterated a notion of “here” and “there” as the viewers moved between them. Continuing our small-scale publishing program, we created an artist book also titled Vertical Slice, documenting the work, featuring a short essay on gravity, and offering a choreographic directive to the installation. (Exhibition photos: Evan Jenkins)