The spontaneity of musical intuition represses everything predetermined, rejects whatever had been learned, and acknowledges exclusively the power of the imagination.
—Theodor W. Adorno on Schoenberg, Philosophy of New Music (2006), p. 95
RAINRAIN is pleased to present By Ear, a group exhibition bringing together the work of Lorna Bauer, Peter Brock, Mira Dayal, and Emma Safir.
The title is taken from an idiom that underlines a condition of making and being without a score. In order to play by ear, the skilled musician has to rely entirely on sound, the medium’s purest and most uncompromising form, foregoing any system of its representation or transcription. Repetitively training their ears, the musicians can unravel the deluge of sensation, palpitation and vibration, as if out of thin air. It is a mode of performing that favors intonation over instruction, intuition over predetermination, change over impasse.
A shared condition of making, By Ear spatializes this poetic attunement exercised by the four artists through intervals—between elements of desire, matters of friction, aesthetics of conquest, and cadences in time. In hums, whispers, excursions and suspension, the artists materialize their imaginaries against reification, rehearsing opacities and freedoms that loosen conventions of perception, language and memory.
Mira Dayal thinks of instruments, those with potential to evade didactic apparatus, language, speech or pedagogy. In her sculptural practice, Dayal pushes the boundary of image and representational regimes, exploring sculpture as drawing and the poetic relationship between one material and another. The small metal sculptures display relational studies with previously discarded elements, solidified as notational preludes for future lives and exits.
Peter Brock works with sound and color. His paintings on aluminum panels reconsider the sublime by the chasm of the technological abyss. Their austere base emulates a digital object, while emanating an obscure glow without declaring a source. Treating each working surface as a proxy of life rather than a plane of projection, Brock creates paintings with spirits of their own; amidst their inclinations and limitations, the paintings hallucinate their own horizons, slitting intelligence with vibrating consciousness.
Quiet violence seeps in Emma Safir’s work, interlaced with delicate care. Safir considers her practice a way of “bastardization,” dislocating hybridization of historical elements from decorative traditions. In folly chaise, Safir pulls the steel spines out of her photographic upholstery into a trolley with no cushion, perpetuating the delay of legibility with a cradle.
Lorna Bauer configures a unique gleam of silver and chrome opacity with glass and light-sensitive silver nitrate, both crucial instruments for early black and white photography. Photographic vignettes of plant life are embedded in the false mirror, with ripples held fast like toxic bubbles in a pond reflective of the Montreal wasteland contaminating local ecology. Stained with silver, the lampwork glassware resembles the yellow fruit growing on the trees surrounding Villa E-1027, the Irish architect Eileen Gray’s modernist masterpiece. Instead of photographing the sight, Bauer recited it with a different layered contraption of fragility with a change of key.
In their different ways, the four artists tackle the limits of sight as a point of departure, treating the compromise of representation as a ruin for renewal—and the plight of sight as sites for rebellion. Together, the works put profound intimacies with their mediums in play, conducting labored memories that remain open to recalibration, and waiting for the arrival of the eternal present.
In the true spirit of the title, this text should offer no rope to interpretation, no point of direction to meaning-making or establishing encounters. But perhaps, what has been written so far can remain irrelevant to the show or the works somehow anyway. Just like scoresheets to music, they cannot be music after all.
—Hindley Wang
