Hugh Livingston exhibition at the SlaughterhouseSpace,
Healdsburg, Sonoma County, Northern California
Jun-Oct 2011
The exhibition Sensory Interventions, organized by Pat Lenz, opened Jun 25, 2011. Sculptor Pat Lenz presented Nobody's Poodle, and Hugh Livingston presented Catch and Release, an homage to the scarcity of salmonids along the Russian River in Sonoma. The exhibition included four major new works.
Made possible in part by The Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation. Organizational sponsorship and collaboration through Russian Riverkeeper. This work was created in part under the auspices of the Chalk Hill Artist Residency at Warnecke Ranch & Vineyards.
Press accounts: ArtPlace, Satri Pencak.
Made possible in part by The Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation. Organizational sponsorship and collaboration through Russian Riverkeeper. This work was created in part under the auspices of the Chalk Hill Artist Residency at Warnecke Ranch & Vineyards.
Press accounts: ArtPlace, Satri Pencak.
RiverChairs
A set of three chairs under an oak tree, resonating and pulsing with the rapidly flowing Russian River, while multiple cello lines intertwine and cascade along with the water (read more about the chairs). The chairs invite sitting; further, they reward it. An intimacy is available, with the chairs providing almost direct contact with the cello recordings, all performed by Hugh Livingston. Other times, the sound seems obscured, far away, occluded; you can’t quite make out the human presence through the fog. Layered on top of the cello are wind gusts through pines, creek water through riffles, mysterious river sounds through time.
RiverColors
Over the course of several years, artist Hugh Livingston collected 193 clips of water flowing through the Russian River watershed. Each one was run through a color identification software system, extracting the top 5 colors in each image and providing the Pantone Matching System numbers for printing accuracy. As the colors were 'discovered', Hugh entered them into a database, assigning a Russian River color number for local reference, and then they were assigned names, meant to have some resonance with a Sonoma resident. The installation consists of an HD video screen cycling the water image paired with an identically shaped color palette, printed on the back of 1/2" plexiglas (see all the River Palettes here). [view video of the completed installation]
The Natural History of Babbling Brooks
A conceptual approach to the babbling brook: what if the soundscape of a creek were not an accident of nature, but deliberately designed? Hugh organizes scientific data on cavitation, bubble size, gravel shapes and sizes, waterfall acoustics, and creekbed dynamics to propose a method for designing one's own babbling brook with the most interesting resultant sound. Gift baskets of gravel, pre-selected for optimum sonic variety and performance, are offered to visitors, starter kits for a creek of their own.
Everyone should find time daily to relax with a good brook. The Krumbein Roundness factor is real, a system for describing the shapes of gravel, dating to 1941. But what if the gravel was chosen in order to maximize the sonic qualities of a brook? Imagining a false natural history, I collect gravel and sounds and wonder how they could be described. English is rich with onamatopoetic words for water; the Japanese also have many varieties. Like capturing birdsong in prose, I attempt to describe the range of water. Note the bell curve distribution of rock shapes; there are few at the extremes, and most are in the center, suggesting they are in the middle of their life. But they could also be of medium softness. What’s your Krumbein index?
Everyone should find time daily to relax with a good brook. The Krumbein Roundness factor is real, a system for describing the shapes of gravel, dating to 1941. But what if the gravel was chosen in order to maximize the sonic qualities of a brook? Imagining a false natural history, I collect gravel and sounds and wonder how they could be described. English is rich with onamatopoetic words for water; the Japanese also have many varieties. Like capturing birdsong in prose, I attempt to describe the range of water. Note the bell curve distribution of rock shapes; there are few at the extremes, and most are in the center, suggesting they are in the middle of their life. But they could also be of medium softness. What’s your Krumbein index?
RiverText
A computer animation of text, rivers of it, drawn from the extensive verbiage which surrounds the River's milieu. This ranges from political to agricultural to water quality and zoning. So much of it flows by unread every day, at least by the fish if not the other River residents, that it might as well be channeled to echo the River that gives it its source. The text follows the River and several of its feeder creeks (see sample renders of this cascade).
