Catriona Jeffries

Curated by Jessie Caryl, this exhibition of works by gallery artist Kelly Wood and Hamburg-based artist Monika Grzymala mixed two different approaches to the structuring, distortion and sensationalization of sound and space that can be inscribed in music and architecture.

Kelly Wood will show a new series of ten unique, large, near-monochromatic photographic images that depict the binary code formats of digital recordings of ten songs. Visible in each photograph are the wave forms and fluctuations in code pattern produced by the sound. For this new body of work, Wood has selected recordings of innovative Canadian electronic or avant-garde music, ranging from Hugh Le Caine's "dripsody" – composed in 1955 from a sound sample of a drip of water falling in a pail — to recordings by Intersystems, the Nihilist Spasm Band, John Oswald and the UJ3RK5. An essay by Eric Bell entitled Sound and Material Signs accompanies the exhibition along with summarized notes about each composer, band or musician. By encapsulating ten compositions performed between 1955 and 1990 in their static sonic residue, Wood’s photos record and make visible the abstract reprocessing of an intrinsically immaterial human activity.

Based in Hamburg and Berlin, Monika Grzymala has produced recent site-specific installations at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, and in the exhibition Freeing the Line, curated by Catherine de Zegher for Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. For this exhibition, Grzymala will produce an installation entitled Distortion, comprised of approximately seven kilometres of adhesive tape. During her two-week installation process, Grzymala has built up lengths and lengths of tape into radiating clusters and striated aggregations of lines that connect to each other and to the floor and walls of the gallery. The look of Grzymala's installation is related to visual interference and pixellation – the random errors and digital distortions which appear accidentally in electronic imagery. In this exhibition a steady, unwavering line on the wall might ripple, buckle and peel out into a physically registered extrusion as unexpected as randomized pixels or improvised noise.

Documentation by SITE Photography.