tekhnē

In her first solo exhibition in Poland Jenny Gräf Sheppard presents her current work and research into sound as energy, self-built instruments and compositional experimentation.

Presented here are speaker-instruments, hand-built porcelain forms developed over several years of experimentation that express energies variously – through their movement, audible sound, and vibration. By unpacking the conventional audio speaker to reveal its ‘guts’ the artist embraces ‘noise’ and interference, results of exposure to a broader and unpredictable ecosystems of influence. What is exposed are mechanisms of work that typically go unnoticed in modern speakers and instruments, namely their transductions (conversions of energy).

Audible tones are never pure. They are always translated and transformed through negotiations within their given ecosystems. The sound one hears, feels, sees is the energetic transformation between the material and immaterial realms.

Gräf pushes back against the slick modern interfaces that privilege control and domination over energy and blind us to an extractive mindset. The artist enters into dialogue with energies of sound and what they perform in her non-conventional approach to instrument design, sound and representation.

Speaker-Instruments collapse the binary of the supposed function of audio speaker/sound source. They reproduce sound, while introducing their own unique voice. Each assemblage of magnets, porcelain, copper wire, wood and electric signal incorporates distinct tonality, distortion, acoustics, and kinetic movement – characteristics that occur out of encounters between energy and material and through negotiation.

The sound composition Gräf has created for this installation of her Speaker-Instruments, choreographs movement of sound across the speakers in the gallery space to work with their various expressions of such energy.

Jenny Gräf Sheppard has included several silk-screened prints that are graphic energy scores.

Jenny Gräf Sheppard (DK/US) – US-born, Copenhagen based artist and musician, has long been a part of underground music, performance and art scenes in Europe, the U.S. and Canada. Aside from research into sound as energy, self-built instruments and compositional experimentation, she works with older people with memory loss, and participatory performances around social codes and behaviors. Originator and founder of the Laboratory of Sound Art at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen.

https://trafo.art/en/jenny-graf-shepparduwalnianie-glosnikow/