Exhibition
The Pierrot Studio
5 Feb 2016 – 17 Feb 2016
Event times
Tuesday to Friday 12 to 6pm
Cost of entry
Admission Free
Address
- Morley House
- 26 Holborn Viaduct
- London
- EC1A 2AQ
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Bus 8 and 242 stop right outside the gallery
- 5 min walk from Chancery Lane, St.Pauls or Farringdon Station
Display Gallery is proud to present The Pierrot Studio a new exhibition of simultaneously visual and aural installations by pairs of contemporary artists and composers. Each pairing will explore thematic elements of Schönberg’s seminal song cycle Pierrot Lunaire.
About
Tim A Shaw and Ewan Campbell will take Schönberg’s study, or studio, as their starting point and will construct a skeleton, life size timber frame replica of this room, based upon photographs of the composer at work. Rather than presenting a stable or fixed piece of architecture, the installation will be much more akin to a psychic, virtual or imagined shell. The immersive room will include re-imaginings of Schönberg’s ‘musical’ sketches and painted self portraits.
Sara Naim and Chris Roe will create a poetic and transient rendering of Schönberg’s moonscape in Pierrot Lunaire. Roe’s composition will be amplified beneath a shallow vessel of milk. As the speakers reverberate with the varying tones and frequencies of the music, the liquid will begin to ripple and embody the sound through the various geometric patterns that appear in it. Naim will illuminate the milk with a strobe every 13 seconds in reference to Schönberg’s notorious triskaidekaphobia. She will create a series of frozen, sculptural moments, between which the audience will wait in darkness, absorbing the sound without vision.
Jörg Obergfell and Stef Conner will look specifically at the absurdist nature of Pierrot Lunaire and create a series of masks and musical motives around the various archetypal Pierrot characters. Conner’s compositions will be interwoven around a central, slowly developing theme of laughter. Obergfell will translate these characters into more or less abstract mask forms that draw inspiration from both folk costumes and modernist aesthetics.
The Pierrot Project is an arts collective that encourages interdisciplinary collaboration between artists, composers and musicians. It aims to enable fruitful cross disciplinary creative practice and engage diverse audiences.
The new compositions written for each installation will be performed by Dr K Sextet at the opening of the exhibition on the 4th of February from 6.30pm.
This exhibition is hosted in partnership with the Pierrot Project and is supported by the Britten-Pears Foundation and the Golsoncott Foundation.
