reprinted from Gallery&Studio, Feb-Mar 2003, Vol 5, no. 3, p 27
Abstract painting and music are so naturally related that their marriage would
seem a match made in heaven. However, "the quest for synthesia," as
the writer and critic William Moritz once referred to it, has consistently fallen
short. Attempts to combine visual art and music - and there have been many over
the past few decades - have generally failed by favoring one medium over the
other.
Far more successful than most attempts to achieve synthesia, in terms of preserving the integrity of the two individual art forms while melding them harmoniously was the collaboration between painter/choreographer Janusz Jaworski and the composer and performer Katie Down in the recent exhibition "Vision Whisper," at Chashama Gallery, 135 W 42nd Street, an oasis of avant garde activity in the midst of the new Disneyfied Times Square. (Jaworski also exhibited some of his visual art at a nearby alternate space called the Peep-O-Rama Gallery, at 129 West 42nd Street, its name apparently a remnant of the funky, pre-Disney Times Square, rife with porno parlors.)
Jaworski, who has worked in many media, including painting, photography, prints, collage, and sculpture has exhibited widely and presented his choreography throughout New York, the Midwest and Europe. Down, who performs on various instruments and vocals with her group Liquid Ensemble, has created sound scores for numerous off off Broadway and downtown venues and performed her music around the U.S. and abroad.
After collaborating with Down on a dance project commissioned earlier in 2002 by Kansas State University, Jaworski asked her to collaborate with him on an art and sound project, for which they toured several countries in Eastern Europe gathering inspiration and material.
"During our travels, I heard and recorded many sounds in all the countries we explored, from folk singing to drying racks to ambient environmental sounds and so on," Katie Down recalls.
"For the paintings in this exhibit that were created after the music," Jaworski adds, "I attempted to make the auditory sense of listening to the music most prevalent. Since many of the sounds in the music came from Katie and my travels this summer, there is an extra layer in those paintings of memory."
While some of the musical pieces were created prior to the paintings, others were created after the paintings. This led to a lively dialogue between painter and composer, during which they traded ideas back and forth, informing and inspiring each other. Thus, Jaworski and Down's pieces achieve something closer to a true synthesia, via the brading of two distinctly different artistic sensibilities, than in previous experiments by artists attempting to meld the two mediums in a more self-consciously experimental manner.
The manner in which the paintings and musical pieces were combined yet recognized as discrete entities was made manifest in the installation of the exhibition. The paintings were generally intimate in scale and each one was mounted on the wall along with a pair of ear phones which the viewer was invited to put on, so that the music could be heard while viewing the visual composition.
The degree to which the images and sounds mirrored each other and were integrated were equally remarkable, since both Jaworski and Down are fluent in their respective mediums and their sensibilities appear to be acutely attuned to each other. This was true in those cases when the music was created before the painting, as well as when the painting preceded the music - distinctions which were made clear in a printed guide available in the gallery.
Executed in ink, watercolor, oil, monoprint, collage and mixed media, Janusz Jaworski's luminous little paintings had a gemlike beauty and an abstract freedom reminiscent of Paul Klee, in that the artist did not adhere to any imposed stylistic signature. Rather, each painting was approached as an occasion for personal expression and formal discovery.
Likewise, Katie Down, composing freely in the avant garde tradition of John Cage, created her musical pieces from a host of recorded aural samplings: snatches of song, nursery rhymes, spoken word fragments, tinkling bells, chimes, percussive rhythms, and even throat clearings, among other unusual combinations that she combined in surprisingly coherent sound collages.
To attempt to describe accurately in words what Janusz Jaworski and Katie Down accomplished in their separate yet harmoniously melded mediums would be a presumptuous and finally fruitless endeavor. Suffice it to say that their collaboration succeeded splendidly, pointing the way for further explorations of the innate relationship between color and form, rhythm and sound.
- Peter Wiley