Materially:
This composite composition draws on two painting and sound installations presented at Place Gallery, Richmond, 2013 and SNO Contemporary Art Projects, Marrickville, 2013. In these installations painting took the form of easel painting, large-scale panel painting and wall painting. Sound took the form of five channels comprised of: a 14-minute mono composition presented on a highly directional Panphonics SoundShower carrier wave loudspeaker, a 9-minute stereo composition presented on Brown Innovations SoundBeam array loudspeaker, and a 12-minute stereo composition presented by using painted plywood panels as resonating bodies for two SolidDrive induction drivers. These three modes of sound diffusion engaged the space in varied forms, from the highly directional to the diffuse.

Conceptually:
How does the audible contribute to our experience of place, and what may it tell us about space? How do we experience sound worlds in which we can locate aspects of real places, compared to those sound worlds that appear free of place? And what happens when we diffuse sounds that are, let’s say for simplicity’s sake, abstract, into, let’s say for simplicity’s sake, real places? And in turn record those spatial phenomena and presences, before combining them with the original material that was represented in that place in the first place?

If for me this work were not about both presences and absences, then I would not mention that it reworks the materials of a painting and sound installation that existed at other places and at other times. In these installations the relationships between painting and sound were rendered complex by a confluence of conjunctive and disjunctive relations. Here and now, in this composite composition you are hearing, the disjunctures proliferate as a result of various absences. Absence of the paintings, of walking through the space, of stopping here and there, of cocking your head to capture a direction of sound, of visual referents of the gallery space, of the pacing and placing provided by the overlap of three sound compositions, of their emergence from different places in the gallery, of their varied forms of diffusion by different types of loudspeakers. Yet, by the juxtaposition of the originally composed sounds, alongside with documentary recordings of their diffusion in a gallery space, a new tension is created between the real and the represented, between the real and the imagined, and between the physical and the psychological.

When I speak of conjunctive and disjunctive relations, I seek to describe the engaging oscillation between what we are able to comprehend, and what we are unable to grasp. Conjunctive relations make sense because through them we construct causalities and understand relationships. Disjunctive relations, on the other hand, are marked by their uneasy along-sidednesses because they remain perpetually unresolved. This particular notion of relations is taken from William James’ writings where he seeks to capture the various ways in which we experience the world – and can and cannot comprehend it.

Michael Graeve, text written in 2013 for a showing at Melbourne Now, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria. Revised 2016.

Conjunctive and Disjunctive Relations, Multiple Spaces Mix, 2013

Michael Graeve