“Easy Listening”
Philipa Veitch, Mark Brown, Ryszard Dabek, Alex Gawronski, Camilla Hannan, Nigel Helyer, Lily Hibberd and Bronia Iwanczak
21 June → 13 July 2013

The exhibition Easy Listening will explore the material and conceptual parameters of the literary and vocal artifact known as the audiobook, investigating the tensions that exist between the form of the written text and its sonorous adaptations. Combining sonic / electronic, sculptural and performative elements that exist in varying degrees of tension with a range of both extant and newly created literary texts, the works in Easy Listening will disclose the manifold operations that exist between forms of writing, speaking, and their technological manifestations. Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises, as well as addressing speculations about the current and future state of the book, Easy Listening will form an intuitive investigation into the ways in which technology is transforming what it means to listen, and what it means to read.

Mark Brown is a Sydney-based sound, installation and photo media artist exploring the phenomenology of space, architecture and acoustic atmospherics. Brown’s practice has evolved into a poetic response to site, critiquing the history and function of architecture by documenting and making manifest unseen and unheard phenomena in space. Selected recent sound and installation projects were exhibited in Come Hither Noise, Fremantle Art Centre (2009), Critical Fixtures, RMIT Gallery Melbourne (2009), Headland, ICAN (2008). Recent solo exhibition projects include Cadence / Metacorner Peloton Gallery (2007) and Exeunt_Site Manoeuvres, CONICAL Inc, Melbourne (2005). Previous key installations were exhibited at Artspace (2002 & 1997). Brown also co-developed and toured Portasonde, a mobile surround sound field unit for dLux Media Arts at Electrofringe, Newcastle (2003). Since the early ’90s Brown has performed with collaborator Ian Randall in sound duo CONTRAIL, including METAKLANG, an exhibition and performance series curated by Mark Brown at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne (2003) and Impermanent Audio (2001). Recent collaborative sound performance projects were undertaken with Khaled Sabsabi (2009) and with Vincent O’Conner in SuperDeluxe at Artspace Centre for Contemporary Art as part of the Biennale of Sydney (2008). Most recently Brown completed an Artspace Sydney, Darling Foundry studio residency in Montreal Canada.

Ryszard Dabek is an artist and academic who exhibits and writes about art and film. His artistic practice encompasses a number of forms and mediums, including photography, video, sound, and digital media. These imaging and dissemination technologies are used to posit a fluid, expanded field of inquiry where the photographic image is often a departure point. Much of Dabek’s recent work coalesces around ideas engaged with the recent past and in particular the idea of a present haunted by the spectral vestiges of Modernity. His recent exhibition at ICAN Optimum Viewing Distance (2012) was an exercise in cinematic archaeology that used the moving image and sculptural installation to tease out the often hidden echoes of time that inhabit landscape and architecture. In July 2012 Dabek is undertaking a residency at the National Film and Sound Archive, to create a body of work based around the now demolished cinemas of suburban Sydney.

Alex Gawronski Frequently my practice reconsiders the role of contemporary art in lieu of the sites of its display. It aims, via the introduction of various imposed but nonetheless pre-extant narratives, to hint at the underlying factors that define what it is to show art. The broader intention of such work is to conjure, in a manner allowing for the openness of poetic inflection, the intersections of power and arbitrariness that define our experience of galleries and museums. On numerous occasions such concerns have taken into account the power inscribed in audio environments. Sound and speech are always fundamental presences in any space no matter how silent. The work I intend producing for the exhibition will extrapolate on the latter point.

Camilla Hannan is a sound artist based in Melbourne, Australia who works exclusively with field recordings. She processes these recordings into abstract representations of place and experience. She is interested in ideas of the ‘sonic object’ and sonic abstraction. Her installation practice focuses on the sonic environment and how ways of understanding can interrogated through various means of sound spatialistion and multi speaker work. She investigates the way in an environment can be constructed sonically, spatially and visually, morphing these three elements into new unsettling worlds. Camilla has performed in Australia, Europe and the U.S.A. She has performed at festivals including Articulating the Medium (San Francisco), Liquid Architecture (Melbourne/Brisbane) and Totally Huge Music Festival (Perth). Her sound installation work has been featured at Instants Chavirés Paris, the Sydney Opera House, San Francisco MOMA, Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne and the AC Institute, New York.

Nigel Helyer (a.k.a. Dr Sonique) is a Sydney based Sculptor and Sound?Artist with an international reputation for his large-scale sonic installations, environmental sculpture works and new media projects. His practice is actively inter-disciplinary linking creative practice with scientific research and development. Recent activities include; the development of a ‘Virtual Audio Reality’ system in collaboration with Lake Technology (Sydney) and the ongoing ‘AudioNomad’ research project in location sensitive Environmental Audio at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales. He is an honorary faculty member in Architectural Acoustics at the University of Sydney and has recently been a visiting Professor at Stanford University. He maintains active research links with the “SymbioticA” bio-technology lab at the University of Western Australia and is currently working as an Artist in Residence at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland. “My practice links both Art and Science, or more accurately Poesis and Teche with a strong embrace of the environment ~ manifest as a range of complex works that form a nexus between art, community and the ecology."

Lily Hibberd is a visual artist and writer, working across live performance, painting, photography, lighting, video and sound installation. Her practice is centered on social contestations of memory, place and history. Recent work has been directed towards encounters with specific communities, such as Bordertown, exhibited at Artspace Sydney in 2008, and the 2011 Fremantle Arts Centre performance installation Benevolent Asylum. In 2011 Lily collaborated with the artist WART for Benevolent Asylum: just for fun as part of Sydney’s 2011 Performance Space WALK program. Lily’s work is also concerned with questions of time and memory in contemporary life, featured in the 2011 solo exhibition in Paris, Seeking a Meridian. Lily is actively involved in producing and supporting critical art writing, and is founding editor of the independent contemporary art journal un Magazine. She holds a PhD in Fine Art and is represented by Galerie de Roussan, Paris.

Bronia Iwanczak is a visual artist whose mixed media practice encompasses film, photography and sculptural installation. For the last 20 years she has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been the recipient of grants including both the Australia Council’s residency programs for Los Angeles and New York. Her work is held in a number of national and international collections which include Artbank, the Samstag collection, the Tate Gallery Library and the Penelope Seidler collection. With a diverse background that straddles the disciplines of Design, Visual Arts and Exhibition Curation, her interests lie at the intersection of narrative explorations of contested histories in relation to the built and natural environment. Sub themes include, social revolution, the politics of religion, ritual performance, the consciousness of objects and technology. Recent site-specific projects include Anachronism, Gardenism at Centennial Park, Sydney and Appin Labyrinth, Appin, NSW. Since 2006 she has been the director of the project, Openletter, an ongoing curatorial program for the presentation of artist books and text multiples. Other curatorial ventures have included the co-directorship of the international online project, ICOLS – The International Corporation of Lost Structures. Bronia is the current in residence Urban Curator for SPUD (special projects under development), a multi-disciplinary design and construction company based in Adelaide, SA.

Philipa Veitch Using drawing, film, sound and installation, my work over the last decade has formed an intuitive investigation into the structural deficits of modernity, reflecting on the profound schism that exists in our experience of the natural and the industrialised world. Elaborating on this psychic and material event of rupture – between the extremes of modernity and primordiality, nature and nurture, self and other – I have produced a body of work that has explored the complex interconnections and radical disjunctions that lie in this interstice between the subjects’ experience of the self and of the world. In more recent years this inquiry has extended into a reflection on human development and the fragility of human endeavour, employing a combination of handcrafted, ‘fine art’ and raw construction materials to examine our Sisyphean efforts to complete Being through the project of capitalism, and within the encounter with the work of art itself.