Blackwood Gallery | Noisemaker[s]

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Noisemaker[s] is the catalogue for the 1999 two-part exhibition by the same title held at the Blackwood Gallery, curated by then Director/Curator Barbara Fischer. This exhibition featured artists who isolate a diversity of noise-material for specific auditory, physical, and emotional effects. The exhibition presented works by Daniel Olson, Marla Hlady, Colette Urban, and Lewis deSoto. The catalogue contains an essay by curator Barbara Fischer, and includes fourteen colour images of the works included in the exhibition.

Excerpt

Noisemaker[s] at the Blackwood Gallery was a two-part exhibition focusing on the eruption of noise in visual art—where its context is less an existing order of music and more and existing framework of seeing. The works of Lewis deSoto, Colette Urban, Marla Hlady and Daniel Olson all draw attention to a very particular, stripped down yet in itself complex and multilayered auditory phenomenon, one whose particular, stripped-down yet in itself complex and multi-layered auditory phenomenon, one whose place is commonly allocated to the realm of noise—a V8 engine in Lewis deSoto’s The Sound of the Trumpet; exploding toy-gun caps in Colette Urban’s Round Peg in a Square Hole; and children’s toys in Marla Hlady’s Drumming Displaced into Different Sized Jam Jars and in Daniel Olson’s White Trash and Noisemaker. Stretched into demanding length, held in an insistently intense proximity, an un-regarded noise is shifted, like a ready-made, into the context of aesthetic attention, where it appears as previously heard but perhaps not yet listened to sound material: rhythms, textures and affective power. Instead of choosing the form of concert—with active performer(s) and seated audience—these artists’ works are located in a spatial context. The works play empirically and conceptually at once with the social power of noise, the way in which it compels puzzlement and curiosity and its disruptive and expressive effects. Fiercely focused, channelled, measured and framed, these works joy-ride on the testing beauty of a particular found sound, and thereby draw us into the orbit of the unsettled, rebellious and exhilarating places of our culture.

–excerpted from the curatorial essay by Barbara Fischer

Curatorial Essay p. 7
Barbara Fischer
            The Sound of the Trumpet p. 10
            Noisemakers, a Marching Band, and White Trash p. 13
            Round Peg in a Square Hole p. 33
            Drumming Displaced into Different Sized Jam Jars p. 36
            Listening to Noise p. 41

List of Works p. 44

Acknowledgments p. 45

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