Frieze 91 members are invited to Almine Rech New York, Tribeca gallery for 'Seeing with our ears, Hearing with our eyes' a conversation between artist Oliver Beer and Barbara London, curator and writer, moderated by Terence Trouillot, senior editor of Frieze. The visit will also include a tour of the exhibition lead by the artist as well as a performance.
Resonance Paintings - Cat Orchestra is an exhibition that unravels the ways in which musical harmony permeates our lives, our cultures and our physical environments, and show the important and unique place that Beer’s work inhabits at the meeting point of art and music.
For “Cat Orchestra,” Beer has tuned an entire band. A chorus of cat-shaped vases, ranging from the classical to the kitsch, are connected to live microphones that feed to a custom-built keyboard and synthesizer. Each key, when played, activates the microphone in the vessel whose resonance corresponds to that note, so that a fin-de-siecle French absinthe pitcher in the form of a cat playing a mandolin sings an F sharp, and a Japanese Maneki-neko sings a D.
If the otherwise inaudible vibrations within these vessels are difficult to comprehend, Beer has devised a way for us to see them. He created the “Resonance Paintings” on view in this exhibition by casting powdered pigment onto a canvas laid flat over an amplifier, on which distortions of the cats’ voices are played. Their abstract, lyrical forms are made by the careful manipulation of sound waves and musical harmonies alone. These singular works are perhaps the first in history to be painted by an invisible hand.