Sounding the Moment

“Sounding the Moment"

 

Four Standing Musicians - 1965 - Bearden Foundation

Four Standing Musicians  1965 Romare Bearden, Watercolour

 

 

Sounding the Moment would be built around Romare Bearden’s 1965 Four Standing Musicians and would function to centre sonic parallels to “sound” each of the works. Frequently in Black contemporary art, there are allusions to music being performed, practiced, heard, enjoyed in private or public, in relation to specific sounding traditions. I am currently working to have one of my own multichannel sound installations exhibited at Christie’s in London in dialogue with contemporary visual artists (painting, photography, textiles etc). Curating an installation with sounding aspects of each visual art work that works individually as well as concurrently in polyphony with eachother is a type of larger audio-visual exhibition I would seek to construct. I would aim to highlight both the range as well as lineages of aesthetic properties that converge and diverge across different art works both visually and sonically across contemporary Black communities globally and how there are different similarities and localised differences that construct aesthetics presented.

 

 

In the case of Four Standing Musicians , the watercolour medium offers a plethora of ways to conceptualise a “bleeding across” which simultaneously creates dimension and obscures the definitive nature of each figure. The blurred nature of the overall work means without its title, the figures would be much more obscure and offers more agency to the onlooker to impose where might the outline of a saxophone or guitar be. The warm vibrancy of the colour palette speaks to the expression of liveness of the sound presented. To me it reads as though it is through the presentation of sound that there is a dissolution of self, individuality into a more collective abstract form where the perceived separation between people, their instruments and their surroundings meld into one another, both flatten and refract into multidimensionality through the sonic remaking of the space. The sounding accompaniment to each work would then seek to reinvigorate that experience for onlookers, in resounding that liveness, captured by the composition of the work.

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