The late composer Pauline Oliveros said deep listening was central in her creative process. “As a musician, I am interested in the sensual nature of sound, its power of synchronization, coordination, release, and change,” she wrote. More recently, Polygonia, DJ and producer of ambient music, added, “It’s the little details which make the timbre of each resonating body special.” The physical process of listening is holistic, and not just meditative, Polygonia explained. “Even if it is not a meditative state but just a clear state of mind while facing deep inner feelings, it can help to process those.”
An outstanding example of ambient music’s holistic potential encompasses LFO, the current exhibition at Material Gallery. Two Utah multidisciplinary artists who have been partners for 18 years, Andrew Rease Shaw and Mary Toscano, embarked on their first formal collaboration for this show. The results are fascinating, gratifying and thought-provoking for how art, in its broadest forms, becomes a therapeutic exercise of spiritual intelligence for viewers and listeners.
LFO stands for low-frequency oscillator. But, while oscillators produce repeating patterns of waveforms that are readily audible, LFOs operate within frequencies that fall below the audible range. With waveforms such as sines, triangles, sawtooths, squares and random creations, LFOs facilitate a musician’s capabilities to modulate pitch, amplitude and virtually every other sonic characteristic on synthesizers and effects processors. Listen deeply as possible to the readily discernible cyclic and rhythmic movement in the music and the acoustic experience expands into recognizing nuanced effects, including vibrato, tremolo and natural harmonics, along with swells and ebbs in volume and sweeps of shifting sound filters and textures that brighten and morph the character of musical sounds over patterns and cycles.
As Toscano created intricate patterns of shapes and colors in her quilts, Shaw instinctualized the natural parallel to LFO’s expressive possibilities. Both art forms share a timeless, universal creative language, even as their respective technical vocabularies incorporate terms and definitions specific to their corresponding practice. Quilting’s compositional essence relies on achieving visual harmony even as the objectives of symmetry and asymmetry are at play. Asymmetry gives quilts their energy so that we see them not as static, uniform or chaotic. Joined by music, the quilts invite us to a rejuvenated space in a gallery experience.
The listening session for the LFO show is a sequenced journey that follows the five quilts created by Toscano. In fact, when Toscano was creating Sequencer, the first quilt, it struck Shaw and generated the idea for accompanying the show with original music. The quilt clearly manifests the image of an electronic instrument and Shaw effortlessly had composed its musical companion. From there, the process became more integrated and organic, as both artists worked on their respective parts.
The second quilt is Portasound, a title which references a generation of Yamaha electronic keyboards that were popular in the 1980s and 1990s and are well known for producing authentic lo-fi sonic palettes. Toscano’s sequencing of half circles and colors matches up exquisitely to the score. The works in LFO inspire viewer-listeners to interpret the quilts and music however they see fit. One visitor remarked that it reminded them of the waxing and waning phases of the moon, which surprised both artists at first but also seemed to make sense.
The dialogue expands with each quilt. The holistic experience is masterfully rendered in the third quilt, Circle of Fourths, a term ideally described as representing the second major part of the musical solar system. As students of music theory learn, the Circle of Fifths and the Circle of Fourths operate with the same harmonic intervals, except each starts on different notes and moves in an opposite direction. The alignment between Toscano’s quilt and Shaw’s music is remarkable. Both intuitively capture the Circle of Fourths’ creative possibilities: transpositions that sustain the original structure and intervals but evoke different mood characters, chord progressions that are denser and more chromatic but open up to improvisation that not only jazz players recognize but also those who specialize in rock, blues and global ambient music.
LFO’s conceptual elegance, however, is taken to even more fascinating levels in the last two quilts, both of which are the smallest of the five. Theme and Variation are saturated in rich hues and bold, earthy tones while the music tips its hat to Bach, quite amazingly, but in an appropriate contemporary framing. The combination at this point opens the gateway to deeper emotional reactions in this unique gallery experience. The first three quilts introduce the pillars in LFO’s creative brief while the fourth and fifth quilts bring us to a larger perceptual space of possibilities for joining intentional and aural imagery to heighten the physical reaction potential for appreciating both art forms.
Toscano and Shaw also collaborated on a series of eight letterpress prints and two assemblages that reinterpret the block patterns used in the quilts. These pieces make for an apt appendix, in appreciating the elements that are part of a superb collaboration.
The exhibition will be available for public viewing tomorrow (Friday, Feb. 21) at 6 p.m., as part of Salt Lake City’s Gallery Stroll, as well during the closing reception on Saturday, March 8, beginning at 6 p.m. Listening sessions at the gallery (2970 South West Temple) also can be scheduled by appointment. Toscano and Shaw will be present at related events, which will give visitors an opportunity to share their experiences. For more information, see the Material Gallery website.