Show 44: Wave Pool

We are constantly surrounded by light and sound waves. We often take our environment for granted, and it's easy to forget just how much most of us rely on light and sound, with our everyday immersion in the pool of particles and waves. It's important to be aware of our surroundings, but it’s difficult to visualize how photons, a basic unit of light, interact with our eyes or how information stored in sound waves passes from one person to another. Most forms of light are invisible to the human eye, but is there a way of visualizing something invisible? We cannot directly observe electrons with a microscope but can we paint them? Questioning the unknown and mapping the unseeable is an ongoing journey for both artists and scientists.
Annie Briard’s vibrating landscapes question how we see the world around us and explore the limits of our perception. Her stereoscopic photographs can be viewed both with and without 3D glasses, creating multiple ways of seeing one image. Kei Ito’s sun gazing prints are created by exposing Type-C photographic paper to sunlight while exhaling on the paper. Her pieces embody the power and trauma of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States during WWII. Tamsen Wojtanowski contrasts light with shadow to create deep textures in her silver gelatin print Easy Wild. The print seems to capture light particles bouncing off the waves. Heather Merckle’s mixed media pieces are inspired by photons, the smallest unit of light. Her photon series imagines how photons might interact. David Chan’s floor installation illuminates a landscape print with a florescent light tube. As the manufactured light washes over the crevices in the landscape it transforms the office lighting into something mysterious, recalling a moonlit horizon. Sara Dittrich considers how we experience sound with our bodies. In her pieces 9 to 5 and Grapevine she repurposes a clock as a metronome and visualizes the passage of speech through a community of disembodied ears. In Sharon Servilio’s abstracted diagram Medieval Psychedelic, a band of color travels through different forms, linking them together across space. Margaret Noble’s work is inspired by the beat-driven dance culture of Southern California in the 1980s. Her interactive light and sound pieces invite viewers to suspend disbelief, take a chance, and immerse themselves in the sculptures.