May 17, 2021 (Palo Alto, CA) - Qualia Contemporary Art is pleased to present Resonance, a group exhibition curated by Xiaoze Xie and featuring works by Terry Berlier, Paul DeMarinis, Guillermo Galindo, and HU Xiangcheng, which demonstrate the connection between sight and sound in contemporary art. The exhibition explores the transformative relationship between visuals and audio, sparking new meanings that reverberate between and beyond each work. Resonance is open to the public from June 3 through July 30, 2021 with a Zoom opening celebration hosted on June 12, at 7:30 pm PST. To RSVP, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/154772636121

Resonance comprises an innovative and provocative array of pieces spanning mixed-media  installation, sculpture, works on paper, and video. Many works also contain performance and time-based elements. Though each artist embodies a distinct aesthetic and approach, when brought together, their works produce new harmonies and dissonances that build on one another. The exhibition title borrows a term from music to describe both the prominence of audio in the show as well as the evocative emotional echo that the art creates. “Resonance” also alludes to the ways in which the works reflect questions about today’s most pressing social and environmental concerns. 

For example, Terry Berlier’s kinetic, sound-based sculptures and installations investigate the evolution of human connections with queerness and ecologies. Her contorted shapes unfold organically, raising questions of orientation and offering alternative modes of inhabiting four dimensional space. She collaborates with engineers, composers, musicians, architects, and natural scientists as part of her practice.

Guillermo Galindo’s multidisciplinary works incorporate the visual markings of musical scores to evoke issues of colonization, immigration, borders, and power. His “genome scores” combine sonic markings with abstract visuals of plants, animals, and microbes, while his flag series repurposes distressed flags from the Calexico border by printing them with graphic lines and shapes. 

HU Xiangcheng’s abstract expressive practice engages with Chinese history and culture, with a focus on China’s rapid urbanization in recent decades. Working with traditional ornamental architectural elements, he both evokes and preserves the symbolic echoes of those materials in the present. 

Paul DeMarinis experiments directly with the material technology of sound, crafting a striking combination of synthetic noises that plumb the possibilities of the form. Often using outmoded technologies of sound and communication, his re-engineered analog contraptions explore the relationship between the material functionality of a device and its meaning. 

Sound Art gained traction among the futurists, Dadaists, and surrealists of the early 20th century and has continued to expand and evolve as an important facet within contemporary art to this day. Over the last decade, the genre has gained prominence as the subject of a few major exhibitions, but still remains a relatively rare feature within art spaces. Exposure emphasizes this novelty by foregrounding sound within the gallery. The four distinctive artists integrate elements of sound into their practices in inventive and provocative ways, demonstrating the flexibility and potential of audio within visual art, and resulting in works that blur the boundaries between mediums. Viewed together in this exhibition, the works will provide an opportunity for viewers to expand their sensory experience of art and their understanding of how art resonates with cultural, social, and environmental issues of our time.

Resonance

Resonance brings together four distinctive interdisciplinary artists – Terry Berlier, Paul DeMarinis, Guillermo Galindo and Hu Xiangcheng - whose work explores the transformative relationship between vision and sound and blurs the boundaries between visual art and experimental music. The exhibition comprises a provocative array of works spanning multi-media  installation, sculpture, works on paper, video and hybrid print, engaging a variety of themes, strategies and approaches. In these innovative works, sound is an important element either directly as a medium and material, or transformed and embodied in the visual forms.

Sound art gained traction among the Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists in the early 20th Century,  and has continued to expand and evolve as an important facet within contemporary art to this day. Exemplifying its recent development, the works by four artists fully activate our sensory perceptions, simultaneously engaging space and time, the most fundamental dimensions of the world we live in. 

Paul DeMarinis gained significant recognition as a pioneering sound and media artist since the early 1970s. He creates sound installations and sculptures that experiment directly with the material technology of sound, crafting a striking combination of synthetic noises that plumb the possibilities of the form. Often using outmoded technologies of sound and communication, he re-engineers analog contraptions to explore the relationship between the material functionality of a device and its meaning. DeMarinis’ recent work explores philosophical ideas - the dialectics of life and death, good and bad, affirmation or negation - in ways that are playful and humorous, often with references to European avant-garde art and to cinema. “Divination” (2021)” is based on the 1968 performance by Joseph Beuys in which he and two colleagues repeated the words “Ja” and “Ne” for an hour; the oscillation of  affirmation and negation is reconfigured in physical forms and animated by movement. With the same simplicity and elegance, “From Tick to Tock” (2021) is a series of mechanical metronomes that serve as homages to various artists and ideas important to the artist. Using Jean-Luc Godard’s famous film “Weekend” as a readymade, his prints from “Early Media Goes to the Movies” (2008) digitally compress three long takes in the film into horizontal panoramas and a vertical strip with soundwave-like patterns. The time-based media of film is systematically transformed into static forms that conflate space and time.

Terry Berlier is known for her kinetic, sound-based sculptures and installations. Conceptually driven, some of her works investigate environmental issues and human connections with ecologies; others explore queerness through metaphor, humorous word-play and abstraction. Brilliant intelligence, formal inventiveness and a keen sensitivity to materials are consistently present in her diverse bodies of work. “Where the Beginning Meets the End” (2012) reconfigures the solo instrument of piano into a circular and group playing device using materials salvaged from the San Francisco dump. The interactive installation invites the participation of the audience. Also included in the exhibition is an exquisitely hand-crafted sculpture titled “Nonorientable (Kokedera)” (2019).The contorted shapes of the sculpture unfold organically and suggest dynamic movement in space, raising questions of orientation and offering alternative modes of inhabiting four-dimensional space. The typology of the Möbiussculpture embodies mathematical relationship which according to Pythagorean ideas is connected with music.

Mexican American artist Guillermo Galindo is celebrated both as an experimental  composer/musician and a visual artist. His multidisciplinary practice redefines the conventional boundaries between music and plastic art as well as the intersections between art, spirituality, politics, and social awareness. “Border Cantos” (2011-) is a collaborative project between Galindo and photographer Richard Misrach that explores the complex humanitarian issues surrounding the United States-Mexico border. Misrach has photographed the border since 2004; he also collects objects along the border, including things left behind by migrants. Responding to the large-scale photographs, Galindo creates sound-generating sculptures from items that Misrach collects, such as water bottles, shoes, Border Patrol “drag tires,” spent shotgun shells, ladders, and sections of the border wall itself. The uncanny instruments that Galindo “improvises” using these mundane and worn objects literally give voices to marginal people who risk their lives to pursue a better life. Galindo’s mixed-media, primarily two-dimensional pieces incorporate images of plants and animals, microbes, abstract forms and sonic markings printed on various materials including steel and Plexiglas.Transparent layers of visuals float in space, overlapping and obscuring each other, creating extraordinary density and richness. Repetition and rhythm of lines and forms lend these pieces a musical quality, demonstrating a unique sensitivity which comes from, I suspect, his trainings as a composer and musician.

 The practice of Chinese artist Hu Xiangcheng could be better understood in the light of his diverse training and working experiences as an artist, educator, curator, designer and social activist, as well as his broader social commitment and cultural concerns.A true cosmopolitan man, Hu had lived and worked in Japan, Africa and Tibet before he returned to Shanghai in 2002 to embark on his decade-long “Rural Reconstruction” project which aspired to improve the lives of residents in the rural areas surrounding Shanghai, and to simultaneously revive ancient Chinese culture and traditional practices.Hu’s recent large-scale installations presented in major museums in China address urbanization, consumerism and the future of our environments and cultures. The works on paper from “Traces of Sound” series (2021)  in this exhibition are ink-rubbings of architectural ornamental elements, other fragments of dismantled houses and recycled tools which the artist has collected over the years. On the fragile surface of rice paper, symbolic echoes of those cultural elements are preserved. One could perhaps imagine the dissonant sounds by looking at the rich textures and disorienting patterns: the sound of pounding on these objects during the ink rubbing process, and the sound of destruction during demolition which is re-enacted by a percussion performance in which the wooden ornamental elements are struck by various metal tools. These ink rubbings are like layered photograms in which ghostly figurines, animals, birds and flowers collide with old address plates, tools and industrial debris, evoking the traumatic fragmentation and loss of traditional cultures and collective memories in the rapid urbanization and social changes in China.

The diverse works by four extraordinary artists could be described as “visual sounds” or “sounding visions.” The combination of and transformation between sight and sound philosophically speak about the interdependence of space and time, and provide potential ways for art to fully engage social realities.

Viewed together in this exhibition, the provocative works offer an opportunity for viewers to expand their sensory experience of art and their understanding of how contemporary art resonates with cultural, social, and environmental issues of our time.

About the Curator

Xiaoze Xie is an internationally recognized artist and the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University. Xie has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally, his recent solo exhibitions include “Objects of Evidence” at the Asia Society Museum in New York City (2019-20) and “Eyes On” at the Denver Art Museum (2017-18). His work is in the permanent collection of such institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Denver Art Museum, San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the Oakland Museum of California. Xie received the Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2013) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2003).