Gloom and Doom 2006
with Steve Rowell
wood, furniture, and acoustic materials
Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
The second installation was a fully accessible, human-scale structure. This makeshift wooden house was built inside the lobby of the Weston Art Gallery, just down the block from the Contemporary Arts Center. It included numerous furniture components -- modular wall units, hutches, a trap, desk, and an oddly haunting puppet theatre for children -- which were made with directions from the do-it-yourself manual, Plywood Working for Everybody. The roofline of the house incorporated eccentric acoustic horns. Directly below the horns, the second story was padded with thick industrial grey felt which couched Rowell's sound composition, "Tactile Air II", a 9-minute mono edit of sonic booms from the Mojave Desert, followed by 11 minutes of silence. Reaching up to 110 decibels, the noise and the perception that might occur at any time might be perceived as insufferable, yet at certain moments, the low-end frequencies could also be considered soothing.
Tactile Air - Weston Gallery