McKenzie Fine Art: Sound and Vision Exhibition 2011

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467 fax 212 989 5642

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	Sound and Vision June 23 - August 5, 2011
	Sound and Vision features paintings and works on paper by four artists whose Op- and psychedelic-inspired art is strongly influenced by music: John Aslanidis, Daniel Hill, Gilbert Hsiao, and Laura Watt. Australian artist John Aslanidis creates complex, moiré patterned paintings in vivid colors, with overlapping and concentric wavy bands that rhythmically pulse and vibrate across his surfaces. The artist cites bass-heavy Dub music as an important influence, as well as ambient trance. He has collaborated frequently with musicians since the 1990s: he not only plays the saxophone, but was a member of Clan Analogue, a sound and visual artist collective, and is participating in visual arts/music collaborations this season in New York and Berlin. Daniel Hill played the bass in bands as a teenager and later created experimental music by manipulating raw sounds into ambient sonic environments. He cites the influence of Minimalist composers such as Steve Reich and La Monte Young, as well as the ambient music and ideas of John Cage and Brian Eno. Hill's linear, obsessively patterned black-and-white paintings on paper are created in a manner akin to a musical performance: just as a musician plays a performance in time, Hill's work is created line by line, with paint slowly applied from a squeeze bottle hovering just above the surface in a session of meditative concentration that allows little room for error. Gilbert Hsiao's irregularly shaped paintings contain intricately overlapped, repeating bands of color combined with metallics. Although each painting is limited to just a few colors, they are vibrant, rhythmic, and optically charged. Hsiao first heard Philip Glass's Music with Changing Parts and Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians in the 1970s. These seminal musical works have remained a constant influence since then: their gradual and subtle transformation of repeated motifs parallels the artist's own working process. After attending a performance of the Broadway show Fela!, Laura Watt was motivated to revisit the African musician's records and was inspired by Afrobeat's polyrhythmic complexity. In her paintings and drawings, Watt commences with a fairly staid linear pattern, and then creates eruptions in the structure, opening it up into a more complex space with orb and paisley forms bursting forth. Through an accretion of these forms, a structural profusion emerges out of a simple pattern.