Time Waves, the new upcoming exhibition at John Doe features collage and animation by Simona Prives. The Brooklyn based artist examines in her new body of work our complex relationship to the environment. The structures within each of her compositions prompts the viewer to piece together an alternative reality, created out of imaginative juxtapositions between growth and decay, the organic and man-made.
Human activity is embedded in abstract landscape – cities are under construction or crumbling, human beings are marching off to war or hard at work rebuilding after the deluge, oblivious acrobats are somersaulting into oblivion. Suggestions of natural elements such as water, glaciers, or mountains are sprinkled with architectural structures that build and then self-destruct. All orders of consciousness are embedded in the physicality of the paint and the ink. In addition, each work combines multiple mediums , which are as Prives explains, simultaneously ”dissecting, rebuilding, layering, and altering.”
Simona Prives collaborated on this project with Australian composer/sound designer Ross Willams. They have worked as a team on several previous works that marry sound and image. Prives says that when image and sound synchronise, relationships are formed where none would normally exist, what Michel Chion calls “synchresis.”
Ross Williams approached Time Waves as shards of fleeting time, fragments of a narrative which cannot be captured yet leaves a sense of creation and destruction, a temporal limbo. Infrasound recordings (upsampled), that is, the sound lower than what humans can hear so they have been speed up to the audible range, consists of volcanic and seismic events as foundation textures. Within the frenetic sounds of creative destruction, you can hear a muted string quartet, representing temporal stasis of sorts.
The sound, as well as Prives’ images, maybe familiar or alien, but they are both always rooted in the literal world.
Grace Noh who curated Time Waves, had collaborated with Simona Prives and composer Shiuan Chang on May We Share Are Minds, a multi-channel video installation which has also debuted at John Doe and will continue to travel and morph, possibly in Asia.
Time Waves
Curated by Grace Noh
December 11 to December 23rd, 2018
Work by Simona Prives in collaboration with Ross Willams
Artist’s Reception: Friday, December 14th,2018 6-9PM
112 Waterbury Street, Brooklyn
11206