Sean Dack "21st Century Dub Dub"
Fitzroy Gallery
This event has ended.
Fitzroy Gallery presents 21st CENTURY DUB DUB, an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Sean Dack. This is Sean Dack's first exhibition at Fitzroy Gallery.
In 21st CENTURY DUB DUB, Sean Dack continues his investigations into ideas of the copy and the original, the use of appropriation and notions of physical versus intangible media. The exhibition is comprised of a single work, Version/Variation (2010), an audio score played in a 26 channel stereo audio installation with listening bench.
Version/Variation is based around Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No. 1, widely considered to be the earliest precursor to modern ambient music. Written in 1888, and lauded by visionaries like John Cage and used in countless film soundtracks, Gymnopedie No. 1 is a part of history of 20th Century Modernism and also part of our collective unconscious. Dack has collected and compiled every commercially available version of this short piano piece, each one performed by a different player, and each one having its own idiosyncratic personality (timing, background noise, performers interpretation),and has overlaid them on top of one another in a multi-track audio environment. Each version is stretched out to the total length of a commercially available compact disc, approximately 72 minutes.
The result is a slow sonorous ambient environment with roots to the original yet has been smeared into an impressionistic whole, an underwater-like cacophony that is both beautiful and engaging, while becoming something new entirely. The work is a cumulative endpoint for Satie's original composition, and Dack now takes the work to a logical ambient/modern horizon-line.
Sean Dack's work—his vibrant CMYK glitch photographs, ghost hardware sculptures of now-obsolete audio technology, virtual exhibitions, and films--investigate the malleability of digital media and how our lives are entwined in the ever-increasing flow. In "Dick Dack Dick Dack (Repeat to Fade)" Liam Gillick aptly wrote:
The viewer is always sucked into a no-time progression that shifts in pulses, where time is a material alongside a commitment to seeking out moments of clarity, where the temporal becomes concrete and back to a flow again. There are moments that are compartmentalized and others that move forwards towards no potential border. Yet within this "practice of flows" there are important markers to be found for those willing to look at what appears to be side production. Sean Dack has the ability to take the parallel histories that mark our culture, then leave traces in the future into a state of clarity and reanimation
Media
Schedule
from May 05, 2011 to June 25, 2011