SOUND PERFORMANCE: Arriving Slowly
Sandra Selig, sound performance at Institute of Modern Art, 2018. Photography by Bryan Spencer.
This event has past
16 Feb 2025
Sandra Selig, sound performance at Institute of Modern Art, 2018. Photography by Bryan Spencer.
| Dates | Sunday 16 February 2025 (This event has past) |
|---|---|
| Times | 3:00pm-4:00pm |
| Cost | FREE |
| Booking | Please book via link below. |
| Age | Recommended for ages 12 and up. Minors must be accompanied by an adult. |
Join Sandra Selig, Ross Manning and Robert Curgenven and experience a sound performance among artwork in the Arriving Slowly exhibition.
Manning and Selig’s visual practice is featured in the exhibition, and their work explores parallel ideas. Manning will perform live with custom devices, generating sonic worlds that work with the inherent quality of his simple materials. Selig’s work is rhythmic, long-form, and space and atmospheric, entering an equivalent push and pull in the line energy to that of the charcoal drawing. Curgenven’s work defines space, treating the volume of the gallery as a container of sound.
Equivalent to the abstract work in Arriving Slowly, the artists’ performances allow audiences to spend time to allow sound unroll without anticipation or judgment. The performance explores ideas of duration, simplicity, and slowness, which are strongly featured in the exhibition.
BACK TO > Arriving Slowly: Exploring the Abstract
Artist bios
Sandra Selig, sound performance at Institute of Modern Art, 2018. Photography by Bryan Spencer.
Sandra Selig
In the iteration of One Rotation at AGNSW for The National 2019, there was a recorded sound component that was played via hidden speakers, on loop near the wall drawing. It was a recording of the artist, striking a de-tuned auto-harp with a mallet, in a circular and cyclical pattern of movement that she felt resonated with the visual and bodily feeling of the spoke-like push and pull in the line energy of the charcoal drawing. The drawing itself uses a cymbal to mark the generative circle at the heart of its radiating form. The artist also explored the sound of the cymbal in some of the recordings by close-micing it and amplifying the sound decay and harmonics that occurs after the cymbal is struck. Even though human ears will detect the sound fading away, the harmonics expand and vibrate through the air and into objects for much longer, as if riding on infinite tangential lines.
For 15 years Sandra has performed live and released albums with Leighton Craig in her current duo Primitive Motion, based in Brisbane. She has also performed solo within her exhibitions such as Exploring Giant Molecules (NorthSite, Cairns, 2023) and in events such as Open Frame (Carriageworks, Sydney 2019) and Mono (IMA, Brisbane 2018).
Ross Manning, image supplied.
Ross Manning
Ross Manning will perform with custom sound making devices. He suspends off-set 12v motors from long cables. As the motors 'wobble', adjusted with speed controls, they send vibrations running up and down the length of cable. Ross then attaches various, simple materials to the cable which too vibrate and generate their own unique sound. Two handheld, sensitive wireless microphones are used to explore these materials, amplifying small sounds which Ross improvises with live by slowly moving the microphones, focusing in on the different objects. The resulting compositions are rhythmic, dense sonic thickets, complex and detailed.
Ross Manning has performed extensively across Australia and internationally included performances in Japan, China, South Korea, New Zealand, Finland, Germany and the UK.
Robert Curgenen, image supplied.
Robert Curgenven
In architectural terms volume can describe ‘the amount of space a substance or object occupies or is enclosed within a container’ – in this case a Gallery which contains a given quantity of air. Volume equally describes ‘the quantity or power of sound’ For this performance the Gallery’s resonances and architectural thresholds will be used to allow the audience to hear the air be brought into motion within the volume of the Gallery while contemplating the artworks within the Arriving Slowly exhibition, making the abstract once again concrete.
Robert has recently returned to Brisbane Australia after some time overseas. He’s produced works for National Gallery of Australia, Musée du Quai Branly (Paris), National Museum of Poland (Krakow), MONOM/4DSound (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw) and Palazzo Grassi (Venice).