Description
This is a pre-order. It will ship on or around 11/6/26
In From Red Black to Black, from Blue Black to Black, McElheny offers six extraordinary meditations. Four wall-hanging works incorporate embedded hand-blown vibrating glass discs that transduce and resonate sound signals. These "singing paintings" amplify musical works by David Grubbs that were especially commissioned for these pieces, as were all the sounds in the show. A combination floor-and wall-based sculptural installation stretches a red-sheathed cable around the interior of the space, transporting a heartbeat-like, non-repeating, non-metronomic signal from a Serge synthesizer to a drum-like cylindrical shell embedded with colored glass discs, the top of which transduces the sound by way of a white glass "drum head." A major floor sculpture at the center of the exhibition is based on the Leslie speaker system best known from soul jazz organ groups; across intervals of silence the melody from a Baroque chorale alternates with the musical trainwrecks of progressively slowed-down harmony parts. Along with the sculpture's spinning, doppler-effect inducing horn element, like the paintings its surface is marked with painted color spectra. The sequence and proportion of these colors reflect McElheny's profound engagement with 19th century explorations of chromatic spectra, in particular the work of French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. The title of the show refers to McElheny's radical idea that the color black exists as an expanded infinite place at the beginning and end of the color spectrum. McElheny's vision puts black at the core of real color, as a full-fledged component of the visible electromagnetic spectrum. In From Red Black to Black, from Blue Black to Black, McElheny effectively decouples the spectral from the prismatic, so the selection, order, and proportionality of its elements is not predetermined. Spectrum as domain of conceptual invention and intervention, upending its rootedness in physics or optics. An aprismatic artifact of rigorous imagination. McElheny was inspired and challenged by the alternative methods investigated by Milford Graves and Joe McPhee. These musicians have taken as building blocks mutable rhythms and microtonality rather than regular time and the diatonic scale. Grubbs's sound source for the four paintings is a slide guitar, with which he patiently explores the timbral effects of microtonal variation. Seeking a connection between the musical and visual expression of this alterity, the exhibition gradually metamorphosed from the narrower concept of transduction into something more inclusive, a capacious sense of chromesthesia in which sound evokes color and thereby stimulates new vibratory realms.
Cancellations:
Because many payment processors no longer return transaction fees to sellers on cancelled orders, any orders or pre-orders that are canceled by the customer before shipment will be assessed a 5% cancellation fee.
Q: How do limited edition and exclusive releases work?
Limited and exclusive items are fulfilled in the order received and may be subject to availability. If we’re unable to fulfill your order, you’ll receive a full refund.
Q: When will my pre-order ship?
Pre-orders ship on or around the official release date. If your order includes both pre-order and in-stock items, everything will ship together once all items are available. All orders are charged at the time of purchase.
