steve
roden
feldman
drawings , 2004
exhibition: loops, g fine arts in washington dc, 2005
curated by christoph cox
"every night, for the month of december 2004, i listened to a cd
of morton feldman's piano and string quartet, in the dark as i fell asleep.
while i was listening, i was also "drawing" in the dark - trying to allow
the sounds of music to suggest movements to my hand holding a colored
pencil against the surface of a piece of paper. the attempt was to capture
(i.e. record) feldman's music onto the surface of the paper, through the
movment of my hands. as i began to draw, the sound of my drawing movements
(pencil on paper) also became an instrument, an accompaniment to the sound
i was listening to - in a way, allowing the sounds of drawing to improvise
with the sounds of feldman.
the drawings attempt to view drawing as a process of recording (music,
drawing, listening moments, falling to sleep moments, etc.) this project
follows years of working with drawings with my eyes closed responding
to sounds in spaces. usually, the drawings are made in specific locations,
using the existing sounds of landscapes (and cityscapes) to determine
the movements of my hand. these drawings were first connected to the idea
of "field recordings"; where one traditionally captures the sounds of
a particular place on tape (as an audio document), as well as to the idea
of how sound was originally recorded (a needle to a wax surface moving
in resonance to sound) - largely inspired by rilke's text primal sound.
these feldman drawings relate, in particular, to a series of drawings
i did several years ago entitled somnabulist(en). the drawings were done
every night upon falling asleep, and every morning upon waking - both
with eyes closed listening to the sounds coming into the bedroom window
- the drawings as kind of half conscious recordings of the last sounds
i heard before falling asleep and the first sounds of the morning. the
biggest difference between the feldman drawings and my previous works
with sound and drawing, is that they use an existing piece of music, rather
than the sounds of a particular location, as audio to respond to. they
also attempt to set up a situation where the audio landscape is the same
every time i make a drawing - every night, falling asleep in the dark,
hearing feldman's piano and string quartet.
in essence, the works are a kind of sampling - a process of re-recording
and transformation through context and repetition. feldman's piece has
been "recorded" onto a piece of paper and transformed, by the limitations
and idiosyncratic nature of this particular recording process - as well
as the somewhat human the tape recorder being used."
(drawings are 10" x 10" with lots of white space, all images are details)
12/10/04
12/15/04
12/19/04
12/2/04
12/4/04
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