I am sitting in a room

About

I am sitting in a room is an exhibition which brings together three artists whose work records time-based processes in painting and sculpture. Often using feedback loops as a basis for composition in their respective practices, each artist responds to Alvin Lucier's masterpiece of minimal composition and drone music.
 
Alvin Lucier's 1969 performance piece, I am sitting in a room, begins with the recital of a text, which is recorded and subsequently played back in the same space. This new audio is re-recorded, then played back and recorded again, each subsequent version more distorted until the human voice is almost completely lost to the resonant frequencies of the room.
 
"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech with perhaps the exception of rhythm is destroyed. What you will hear then are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk

As Lucier's work demonstrates, structure is destroyed and constructed concurrently through feedback loops, and personal traits or glitches can be 'smoothed out' through their desolation. As with all forms of feedback, this is a system where the results of past performance are reinserted into the present. In response to Lucier’s work, three artists present their own form of feedback. Their work develops from the re-evaluation and insertion of past themes, ideas and motifs. Presenting material aspects of the everyday, the work suggests the patina of ritual. Domestic familiarity becomes abstracted through the artists’ decisions and processes, highlighting these elements and functions while at the same time transforming them within the logic of the works themselves. The language of sculpture and painting, which by its own self-referential nature is already involved in a type of feedback loop, is used to build and take apart themes, forms and structures concurrently.

 

Roy Immanuel  (b. 1983. Lives and works in London.) Selected exhibitions: Teratology, Barbican Arts Group Trust (2018), Saltpetre King, Casa Cultural Amaru, Lima, (2017), Subjective Reality, Shanghai MOCA, (2016) the Function Room, London (2015) and Saatchi New Sensations, London (2014). http://royimmanuel.com/

Andrea Scopetta (b. 1977, Italy. Lives and works in London) Selected exhibitions: Summer exhibition, Walthamstow Window’s Gallery (2018). Cross Culture, Sway Gallery, London (2017). Artworks Open, Barbican Arts Group Trust, London (2015). T-A-X-I, Almanac project, London (2013). BETTER THAN BETER, Copenhagen Place, London (2013). Polline e cerniere, Istituto Svizzero di Roma sede di Milano, Milan (2012). Il mondo in presenza di cose, Perugia, (2010). I'm not here / I'm not her, Ancona, (2010). White Project arte contemporanea, Pescara, (2009). Aloe Vera, Zelle Arte Contemporanea, Palermo (2009). This is for you, fuorizona artecontemporanea gallery, Macerata (2008). Basico, Galleria Paolo Erbetta Arte Contemporanea, Foggia (2008).
 
 
John Thole (b. 1978, Banbury. Lives and works in London.) Selected exhibitions: Night Plinths, Narrative Projects, London (2018); Teratology, Barbican Arts Group Trust, London (2018). Subjective Reality, SheShan MOCA and Forbidden City Gallery, Shanghai, China (2016); Jerwood Drawing prize, Jerwood Space, London, the Wilson, Cheltenham, Sydney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury and Falmouth Art Gallery (2016); A Bestiary, Turf Projects, Croydon (2015); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, World Museum, Liverpool (2014); A New Circle, Forbidden City Gallery, Shanghai, China (2014). http://www.johnthole.com/