Quadraphonic

About

Curated by Mairia Evripidou and Philippa Ramsden

FOLD Gallery London is pleased to present, for the first time, a show that has a focus purely on sonic art. Quadraphonic brings together a diverse range of artists exploring the tri-relationship between sound, space and viewer, or perhaps, more appropriately, we should say listener. Working within sound's ephemeral domain, each artist explores the 'physicality' of sound: the ability of sound to not only saturate, but also encompass, the space in which it is contained, allowing the audience an almost sculptural mode of listening.

Sound surrounds - it transmits, communicates - the social consequence of an acoustic arena is an acoustic community. Sound comes to be a social phenomenon that expresses itself in public. A distinct characterisation of sound is that each one of us, individually, interprets it in a different way: we use our own personal cognitive mapping of space to decipher, and to create, a compelling internal sense of the external world. Focusing on the sound, and not on the stable, unchanging context (for example within this gallery space) we can notice a transformation in both the character and the context, as our own experiential sensation of the space evolves. The space itself has been defined by, not only the presence of the listener, but also the presence of the sound. In this way the influence of sound on its audience is wholly relative, both in terms of its nature and its context. The sound can act, but it is up to us how we choose to read it. It is the inhabitants that become the final aural architects of the space.

Sound comes to define and characterize the existing environment, and contribute significantly in the materialisation of the context. The distinction between sound and space begins to evanesce. To quote David Worrall (1998): 'The space is in the sound. The sound is of the space. It is space of sound, but there is no sound in space.'