Opening Friday, August 17, 7-9:30pm

On view through October 26, 2007

Jack Straw Productions is proud to present Every Island Fled Away and the Mountains Could Not Be Found , a new installation by Bay Area artist Jim Haynes in the Jack Straw New Media Gallery, opening August 17 and on view through October 26, 2007.

Jim Haynes: "For many years now, I have defined my work through the pithy phrase, "I rust things." These three words have defined my artistic activities, and they have adapted well to a multiplicity of meanings and contexts. Initially, my work engaged the physicality of rust as a medium to supplant my frustrations I found in oil painting, developing into strategies for installation and eventually for sound composition. Drawing from the grey ether of shortwave, electric field disturbances, controlled feedback manipulation, and numerous textural scrapings from rusted metals, roughly cut glass, and gritty stones, I build droning sound-fields and compositions of broken minimalism, which are often transmitted through multiple channel speaker constructions alongside other visual ephemera. These sounds flicker, dissolve, mutate, and coagulate into fleeting, but nevertheless sympathetic accompaniments to the visual materials. The results of this engineering through disparate materials seeks to evince the unpredictability of decay, to manifest its potential for a rough hewn beauty, and to bare witness to its inevitability."

Every Island Fled Away and the Mountains Could Not Be Found is an installation for sound constructions and corroded photographs, collectively acting as a metonymic, divergent presentation of how vibrations affect the surface of water. The audio component features a multi-channel sound construction of numerous 3.5 inch speaker cones with small wine glasses resting upon the cone of each speaker. These wine glasses in turn would be filled with variable solutions of cupric sulfate, aluminum chloride, rust, and water. In pushing very low frequencies through the speakers and up through the stem of the glass, the ensuing vibrations would cause variable patterns to appear on the surface of the liquid. The choreography of these vibrating surfaces is complemented by seven composite images of corroded photographs, which has bruised and contaminated by the same chemicals found within the solutions found in the sound constructions. While these images describe similar undulations of watery surfaces, the corrosive process has been so extensive as to obfuscate and abstract those buried images.

Jim Haynes resides in San Francisco and has exhibited at Westspace (Melbourne, Australia), Diapason (New York), The Exploratorium (San Francisco), Works (San Jose), Eyedrum (Atlanta), The Lab (San Francisco), The Fugitive Art Center (Nashville), Zeitgeist (Nashville), and Varnish (San Francisco). He collaborates with Loren Chasse as Coelacanth, an audio/visual ensemble that has produced four album and numerous live performances. Since December 2001, he has been the Editorial Director for 23five, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development and increased awareness of sound art within the public arena. Through 23five, he co-curated the 2003 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival and has begun curating the 2007 Activating The Medium Festival at The Exploratorium. He also writes extensively on sound art, noise culture, minimalism, and general music experimentation for The Wire, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Sound Projector, and Chunklet.

Website: http://www.jackstraw.org/programs/asp/ASP_main.shtml

HOME

CALENDAR

ARTIST PROGRAMS

EDUCATION

RECORDING

SUPPORT

Jack Straw Productions