Ella Finer: Where We Meet, Volumes 1 and 2

6 September – 21 October 2012

 

Mimicking the motion of sound as unfixed and unbound to any one location, whose nature it is to move through space, Ella Finer wandered the Arthaus building as an ‘Itinerant Resident’, taking up new spaces during 12 weeks, so as to map the movement and practice of the voice at each point. Using her own and others’ methods of composition with sound and voice, each week was recorded and consequently worked into a distinct sonic document of the space and time in which it was made.

 

Where We Meet, Volumes 1 and 2 is the resulting exhibition of this record making, in which 12 speaker-boxes play back the 12 compositions into the expanded space and spaces of GALERIE8.While the compositions take multiple forms – from the sung to the conversational; from the scripted to the incidental – they are all attempts to attune to the building’s own resonances and frequencies. This method of resonating, of listening to the space in order to return sound back to it, runs through all the compositions 

whether working solo or with the guests in the project, who are Finn Andrews, James Bulley and Daniel Jones, Marcia Farquhar, Pete Fraser, Maggie Pittard, PA Skantze, and The International Western.

 

“Is this where we meet?” asked guest artist Marcia Farquhar on encountering Finer as they walked up and down the emergency stairwell of the Arthaus building. Taking its name from this question, Where We Meet is an open-ended answer to wondering about where bodies find or experience each other; how sound aides or confuses communication; and where the artwork or the sound-work meets the body of the viewer and auditor in time and space.  

 

That the sound compositions cannot be contained within the notional boundary lines of the gallery’s ground floor offers another significant point of meeting: along the blurry territory where the gallery meets the other socially composed spaces of the building.

 

Where We Meet is presented in two volumes or contrasting configurations and placements of the speakerboxes in the building. Volume 1 presents the 12 compositions together in the gallery space, while Volume 2 returns the compositions to the places in which they were made. On two occasions during the run of the exhibition the compositions will be exhibited as Volume 2, where visitors will be invited on a listening tour of the sound works throughout the building.

GALERIE8

203 Richmond Road

London E8 3NJ