Sonoma Oaks: Points of View
A solo show that was exhibited at the Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, from June to September 2012. The work featured a combination of timelapse video, aerials, high framerate video, multichannel sound installation, nature sounds, and cello performance, as well as an 'atelier' installation showing my working process.
Multimedia artist and composer Hugh Livingston presents a series of audio and video installations immersed in the patterns and sounds of California's oak habitats. Continuing his deconstruction of the Sonoma landscape, which began in 2011 with his color analysis of the Russian River, Hugh examines the sounds of raindrops and wind on oak leaves and documents unusual interventions in the environment with timelapse and aerial photography.
Sonoma Oaks soundscape
Cellist and composer Hugh Livingston assembles a gallery of highly ephemeral wisps of memory: fragments of cello sound that attempt to insinuate themselves into the natural landscape. The composer Claude Debussy was very interested in being freed from the dominance of the concert hall; he wanted his music liberated into the wild. Hugh allows this to happen with a deconstruction of the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. One could call it quotation, yet almost no fragment is discernible within its original context. Instead, it is a set of endless variations on the unfolding textures. Even Debussy's original is timeless and formless, a floating composition which should be blown about by the wind. Time spent in the oak groves leads inevitably to analysis of the process of decay and regeneration: the perilously balanced cantilevered long branches that fall to the ground in a modest wind soon start to unravel their thick outer bark and the red cork interior emerges and falls to pieces, while it still suggests the original form. An oak tree sheds limbs down the hillside like a child's mittens; these limbs and the musical fragments are reflections of the whole.
Varied Sonoma soundscapes are spatialized in the room using software that directs the sound into eight channels. All sounds were recorded in oak habitat over the course of the last six months. The large-screen video installation combines many video sources to echo the idea of looking at the tree from many angles.
A quick tour of the gallery below:
Multimedia artist and composer Hugh Livingston presents a series of audio and video installations immersed in the patterns and sounds of California's oak habitats. Continuing his deconstruction of the Sonoma landscape, which began in 2011 with his color analysis of the Russian River, Hugh examines the sounds of raindrops and wind on oak leaves and documents unusual interventions in the environment with timelapse and aerial photography.
Sonoma Oaks soundscape
Cellist and composer Hugh Livingston assembles a gallery of highly ephemeral wisps of memory: fragments of cello sound that attempt to insinuate themselves into the natural landscape. The composer Claude Debussy was very interested in being freed from the dominance of the concert hall; he wanted his music liberated into the wild. Hugh allows this to happen with a deconstruction of the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. One could call it quotation, yet almost no fragment is discernible within its original context. Instead, it is a set of endless variations on the unfolding textures. Even Debussy's original is timeless and formless, a floating composition which should be blown about by the wind. Time spent in the oak groves leads inevitably to analysis of the process of decay and regeneration: the perilously balanced cantilevered long branches that fall to the ground in a modest wind soon start to unravel their thick outer bark and the red cork interior emerges and falls to pieces, while it still suggests the original form. An oak tree sheds limbs down the hillside like a child's mittens; these limbs and the musical fragments are reflections of the whole.
Varied Sonoma soundscapes are spatialized in the room using software that directs the sound into eight channels. All sounds were recorded in oak habitat over the course of the last six months. The large-screen video installation combines many video sources to echo the idea of looking at the tree from many angles.
A quick tour of the gallery below:
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