“Listening to Richard Chartier’s work is like sitting in a room at dusk while the light fades. As colours and detail drain away the eye seeks to compensate, peering eagerly at the slowly disappearing surroundings. The fade-out provokes both ambition and anxiety in the perceiver, and the awareness of seeing and not-seeing becomes as important as the objects of perception. Chartier’s work plays a similar double game of seduction and evasion with the ear.”
– Will Montgomery
“On the surface of silence: reticence in the music of Richard Chartier”
from BLOCKS OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE UNBROKEN CONTINUUM
(Sound 323, UK)
Richard Chartier (b.1971), sound and installation artist, is considered one of the key figures in the current of reductionist electronic sound art which has been termed both “microsound” and Neo-Modernist. Chartier’s minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself. Chartier’s sound works/installations have been presented in galleries and museums internationally including the 2002’s Whitney Biennial and he has performed his work live across Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America at digital art/electronic music festivals and exhibits. In 2000 he formed the recording label LINE and has since curated its continuing documentation of compositional and installation work by international sound artists/composers exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism. In 2010, Chartier was awarded a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship to explore the National Museum of American History’s collection of 19th-Century acoustic apparatus for scientific demonstration.
Visit Richard Chartier’s website: 3particles.com
Lucky Dragons (US) is an experimental group consisting of artists Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara. Based in Los Angeles, California, they are noted for their unusual sound, described as having the ability to make “‘everyday sounds’ become alluringly other.” Their performances include live music, video projection, and sounds created in collaboration with the audience. They have performed at major international art institutions and at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
Visit Lucky Dragons website: luckydragons.org
Steve Roden (US) is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, living in Pasadena. His work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, text and performance. Roden’s working process uses various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translates them through self-invented systems into scores, which then influence the process of painting, drawing, sculpture, and composition. These scores, rigid in terms of their parameters and rules, are also full of holes for intuitive decisions, failures and left turns.
The inspirational source material becomes a kind of formal skeleton that the abstract finished works are built upon. In the visual works, translations of information such as text and maps, become rules and systems for generating visual actions such as color choices, number of elements, amounts of time and form building. In the sound works, singular source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings, are abstracted through humble electronic processes to create new audio spaces, or possible landscapes. The sound works present themselves with an aesthetic Roden has described as lower case – sound concerned with subtlety and the quiet activity of listening.
Yann Novak is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. Through the use of sound, light and space, he explores how these intangible materials can act as catalysts to focus our awareness on the present moment and alter our perception of time. Novak’s work, whether conceptual or rooted in phenomenon, are informed by his investigations of presence, stillness and mindfulness. His works can be experienced as architectural interventions, sound diffusions, audiovisual installations and performances, durational performances, concerts and recorded sound-works.
Novak has presented his installation work through solo exhibitions at 323 Projects (US), Armory Center for the Arts (US), Jack Straw New Media Gallery (US), Las Cienegas Projects (US), Lawrimore Project (US), Soundfjord (UK) and in two person exhibitions at the Henry Art Gallery (US), Pøst (US) and Soil Art Gallery (US). His sound-works and scores have been presented internationally as part of multiple group exhibitions and diffusions at venues and events including the American Academy in Rome (IT), Aqua Art Miami (US), California Museum of Photography (US), File Hipersonica (BR), Gift_Lab (JP), London International Festival of Exploratory Music (UK), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (US), Suyama Space (US), Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (US), TBA Festival (US), Western Bridge (US) and others.