Sound piece, 12 hours, stereo, 2016

Exhibitions: Dreamlands, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, The Sound of Colour, Auge & Welt Gallery, Aachen, Germany, 2022

This sound work takes its inspiration from the description by Alexander Scriabin of one part of his unfinished massive multimedia project he called the Mysterium. For Mysterium, Scriabin envisioned “bells hung from clouds” heralding a week-long performance that was to take place in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains.

The Mysterium was meant to involve a cast of thousands: singers, dancers, musicians, lights, smells, mists, stones, and weather. Scriabin’s goal was to create a “totalizing experience” that would result in the annihilation of the world in order to bring a new, more perfect one into being. Scriabin only completed notes for the Mysterium he called the "Prefatory Action," prior to his death. The composer Alexander Nemtin spent nearly three decades reassembling the work into a three hour composition of the same title.

Canopy is a 12 hour sound work comprised of recordings of Eastern Orthodox bellpeals played at 15 minute intervals interspersed with room tone similar to the sound of the gallery’s air ventilation system.

The room tone of the gallery space is utilized to create a bubble-like audio space that keeps the audio space in a state of suspension. While viewers may not be consciously aware of the change in the sound in the gallery, their physical experience will be transformed and quieted as the ventilation system hum track prevents other sounds from entering the gallery.

Like a belltower chiming the quarter-hour, these sounds call visitors into the space in which the film Twilight Arc is looping. The bells also jolt viewers out of any cinematic reverie that the film loop has created, making them newly aware of their surroundings.

I have chosen Eastern Orthodox bells for this work both because of Scriabin’s heritage (his compositions are clearly indebted to these sounds) but also because these bell works, dating from the early Middle Ages, are syncopated, exciting and dynamic. They bring a new conception of history into the space, one that does not distinguish between “primitive” and “advanced” but which exhibits these sounds in their own right, as complex works that contain both spiritual and practical functions.