The Athenaeum Art Center just opened a new exhibit called "Ess Whiteley: listening materials." It’s an exhibit that asks you to pay attention to sound.
Ess Whiteley is an artist, but instead of using paint or clay, their chosen medium is sound.
"I just think there's so much to explore with utilizing sound in a gallery context,” Whiteley said. "I think of this piece very much as a work of sound art where the sound is almost like a vibrational sculpture or a sonic sculpture."
Listening materials are an immersive sound installation where audience members — listeners — can walk through a space and experience a 20-minute sound piece on a loop where objects are placed on multiple exposed speaker cones arranged throughout the gallery.
"There's something about taking a speaker out of its normal context and seeing it just hanging from the ceiling, or seeing it on a pedestal in a gallery, and vibrating these materials I found very exciting because you are not used to seeing a speaker do that,” Whiteley said.
I step up to one speaker and peer in. As I watch rocks bounce around, I have an epiphany: I am seeing one sound create another.
"Yes, exactly,” Whiteley replied. "So there's kind of two sounds happening. There's the sounds of the sine tones, these basic frequencies that the speakers are sounding, and then there's the contact that the rocks or the ping-pong balls have with the speaker membrane that is creating a second sound."
And the sounds are going to be different for each person.
"It's designed to be kind of the listener is co-creating the piece with the materials that are being played on loop,” Whiteley explained. "The chord sounds like it's changing, that the frequencies sound like they're changing based on how they're resonating in the space, but actually they're not really. So it creates this really kind of auditory illusion, like an optical illusion, but with sound, right?"
Whiteley has always been drawn to sound.
"Sound is this invisible, ghostly, mysterious, magical thing,” Whiteley stated. “I really think of it as being this kind of magical force where it can create these effects in the human body and in the brain and in a space and act upon materials in this way that is felt but isn't seen."
But Whiteley wants to make sound that you can see. So you will see ping-pong balls energetically bouncing around in a large speaker.
"So it creates this very interesting, almost sonic visualization,” Whiteley explained. “We’re also seeing what the sound is doing."
In contrast to the ping-pong balls, tiny rocks in a small speaker almost sound like insects to me. Whiteley’s creative process involved not only experimenting with different objects but also different sounds.
"There were certain pitches that I had to set the frequencies to in order to find the sweet spot of this is where the material really dances and sings,” Whiteley said.
The exhibit is all about contradictions — like making the invisible visible.
"I have been trying to work with sound for this particular piece as something that feels material and has a kind of visible quality to it,” Whiteley said. "Yet at the same time, sound is invisible, and it is ephemeral, and it is this kind of mysterious thing that is intangible. And so I'm trying to leave room for that aspect of sonic experience as well, where you're not seeing it, you're not able to touch it, you're not able to really feel the physicality of it, but it sort of gestures towards maybe there being some sort of physical material quality. And this is kind of a question that's baked into the installation, is sort of the physicality of sound, the materiality of sound, also the vibrancy of materials."
Come listen to the art of Ess Whiteley. It may change the way you perceive the world.
Ess Whiteley: listening materials will be at the Athenaeum Art Center in Logan Heights through Oct. 17.
