Artist

DAVID CHESWORTH

Date: 13-Jan-2012 – 29-Jan-2012

Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania

“David Chesworth moves away from the large-scale site-specific installations of his and Sonia Leber’s work to produce an intimate listening environment and invites the audience to apprehend the eight-channel works… on their sonic merit. The striking juxtaposition of synthesised and field-recorded sonic environment provides the listener with a fresh auditory perspective on both sound sets while provoking their curiosity about the works’ extra-musical associations.

Oceanography is an almost completely synthesised soundscape that Chesworth describes as suggesting an ‘underwater eco-system’. High, diatonic tones shimmer above humming chordal currents, frissons of static, pealing motifs…the characteristically dream-like timbral palette and steady but understated pulse give the work a theatrical quality well beyond immediate surroundings.

After the synthesised sounds of Oceanography, the strictly field-recorded bird and insect calls of Peron Station sound strikingly artificial. The call of the Chiming Wedge-Bill resembles the metallic tinkling of digital artifact in a badly encoded MP3. The White-Winged Fairywren twitters like a tiny super-charged Leslie speaker. Beetle stridulations coalesce in what sounds like a granulated shopping cart. Only the recordings of blowholes and the odd crow betray the natural origin of their unearthly sounds.”

(Excerpt with permissions taken from RealTime, 104, August-September 2011).

This project is a partnership between MONA and CAST as part of the MONA FOMA 2012 exhibition program.
David Chesworth’s 4-channel sound installation, Oceanography/Peron Station, courtesy the artist and Fehily Contemporary.