Sliding Doors

2012

Bridget Johnson
spatial.perceptions.of… 2012
spatial.perceptions.of… continues a series of installations which are designed to activate the audience’s spatial awareness. Using instrumental and natural sounds recorded inside and outside the gallery, Bridget Johnson sets out to remap the acoustic identity of this vestibule to disperse its sonic boundaries. She seeks to test the notion that ‘the perception of space convolutes the experience of space’.

Bridget Johnson is a candidate for a Masters of the Musical Arts at the New Zealand School of Music. Her work has evolved from electro-acoustic composition to interactive and multi-channel installation and instrument design, to the performance of live electronics and film composition/sound design. She has produced installations who.where.now (2011), First Steps (2009) and Audible Identities (2009). Her current work involves the development of performance interface tactile.space, a multi-touch tool for live sound diffusion.

Dugal McKinnon
Cadence  2012
The end. Classical music fell for endings, particularly those that started as beginnings. Beginnings that are already endings. An implacable swoon. “The crash might have been the last bars of a symphony. He lay on his side amid the ruins like a wounded gladiator, a fallen horse” (Jonathan Franzen). The perfect cadence is to fall and become the fallen, the cadaver. But these endings are also recapitulations, signifying the beginning. The irrevocable return. “Now was the Sun in Western cadence low” (Thomas Milton). Beginnings and endings that persist through repetition become cadences punctuating time’s passage. “Walking and falling at the same time” (Laurie Anderson). Tempo. Measured quickly enough time becomes audible. Oscillation. The pulse, the beat ascending into pitch and timbre. Here the liquid cadence, rising and falling as “the general modulation of the voice” (Samuel Johnson). With the voice comes the self. “Listen, says a voice: some being is giving voice” (Steven Connor). The beginning. 

Dugal McKinnon is a composer of electronic, instrumental and multimedia work, a sound artist, and a writer on contemporary music. He teaches sonic art and composition at the New Zealand School of Music, Wellington. 

MaxMSP programming by Jason Post. Metronome loaned by Douglas Mews. 

2011 

Jason Wright
Jukebox 2011
Jukebox drew attention to the loudspeaker as an entity as important to music reception as any other technology that has informed the creation of music. The music that was played through the installation was an assemblage of material collated from participants at an opening night event. Through the collated variation of sounds filtered through the wall of Wright’s loudspeakers, the installation served to highlight the speaker as an instrument integral to how we perceive sound and music. 

Jason Wright is a sound artist and musician living in Wellington. Currently undertaking a Masters of Music Arts at the New Zealand School of Music, his current research sees him looking at tactile applications for the loudspeaker and the psychoacoustic effects of the object, using it not only to re-produce, but also to generate new sounds and music. 

Jason Post
Sirens  2011
The primary concern of this sound based work was the interstitial space it inhabits. The space between the sliding doors of the Adam Art Gallery usually goes unnoticed. Its qualities as a threshold are masked by its functionality as an entrance way. This work aimed to draw visitors in and to entice them to take notice of their immediate surroundings, however momentary and seemingly incidental. As one walked through the speaker array, human voices replaced the soft sine tones, and  followed them as they pass through. The space became a siren-like trap as the beauty of the harmony motivated  the listener to stay. This also made for a potentially uncomfortable experience. 

Jason Post is a Wellington-based composer and a recent graduate of the sonic arts program at the New Zealand School of Music. He is currently undertaking an honours degree in this same field. This work is the third in a series of four sound installations he has produced that attempt to engage with space as the primary compositional material. 

2009

Johannes Contag and Michael Hobbs
Notions of Passage 2009
This sound installation was based on field recordings collected while artists were working on the walls of the gallery in preparation for the Wall Works exhibition in 2009. Notions of Passage explored the concept of transition using the doorway to the gallery as an in-between site, and treating the visitor as the agent who activates the work. It invited one to stay and listen to the sounds that gave form to the changing space within the gallery.