exhibition brochure (PDF) - Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ...

Jess Rowland
Jess Rowland’s artworks and installations explore how sound can be embedded
and embodied in physically immediate ways, aiming to close the gap
between the object that produces sound and sound itself. Her works draw on
the sound-conductive properties of rather unexpected materials—copper
foil, metal-based inks, photosensitive paper—and the way pattern influences
signal. If that sounds rather technical, the concrete phenomenological experience
of Rowland’s works is anything but. Guided by a sincere wonder for
the existential strangeness of the world (or, as the artist put it, the “intense
weirdness of a bag of potato chips”) and inspired by influences as diverse
as Sufi mysticism, experimental music practices, and the sequined glitter of
camp culture, her works provide an almost alchemical experience—they
are living systems, haptic and optic, that often react to the viewer’s body.
Rowland’s latest work is anchored around home-developed arrays of flat audio
speakers, made out of sheets of copper foil cut into wild swirling motifs based
on Sufi Ebru drawing or expansive fields of repetitive geometric pattern and
attached to clear acetate or paper backing. Their handmade aesthetic and
glimmering fragility evokes equal parts Joseph Albers, Eva Hesse, and Ziggy
Stardust. The patterns accommodate multiple sound signals but at the same
time induce varying degrees of signal loss. In the artist’s most recent installation,
a custom algorithm feeds the surface arrays randomized sound samples,
some created, some scavenged from consumer culture—one consists of a
robotized voice reading out the content of the artist’s spam inbox—while ambient
sounds and the electromagnetic fields of arrays interacting with those of a
viewer’s body generate feedback loops. This creates a highly contingent soundscape
that conjures the sense of being inside an organism that reacts to you as an
organism. While Rowland’s fondness for chance, then, points towards an interest
in entropy and the scrambling of information, her work also speaks of regeneration
and an infectious joy in the animation and transformation of materials.
Jess Rowland: Tapestry, 2013 (detail); copper foil on acetate; 48 × 18 in.; courtesy of the artist.