In this exhibition of new work by West Coast artists Mauricio Ancalmo and Sarah Rara, our understanding of sound is examined through its intersection with images, objects and texts. Rara (half of the cult band Lucky Dragons) takes the more playful and accessible approach, while Ancalmo tends to lace his projects with nods to the usual suspects of theory.
Occupying the first gallery is Rara’s video A Ray Array, an hour-long sequence of vignettes riffing on visual and aural interference. In one scene, two drummers beat on a glossy rock, generating metallic-sounding notes that reverberate weirdly; in another, brightly colored polyhedrons twirl in space, meeting periodically to produce new tonal combinations and clashes. Approaching formal experimentation with the modesty of a high-school science project, A Ray Array is stylishly disarming.
Grander but less affecting is Ancalmo’s Dueling Pianos (Agapé Agape in D Minor), in which two player pianos facing each other are joined together by a loop of punched paper that moves jerkily through a word processor placed between them. The instruments emit a disjointed composition derived from the superimposition of an essay about Gilles Deleuze, the philosopher who popularized the idea of the branching rhizome as a model of communication, over the original musical scroll. It’s a bit of Conceptual fancy footwork that, while thematically appropriate, feels distinctly bolted-on.
A third gallery is lined with smaller mixed-media works and photographs that provide background to, or spin off from, the show’s two centerpieces. Here, it’s Ancalmo’s prints of manipulated filmstrips that win the sound clash.
—Michael Wilson