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IN THE EVENING OR IN THE EXTREME EARLY HOURS OF THE MORNING, AUDIENCES ARE INVITED TO LUPA ART, A SMALL, EMPTY WAREHOUSE SPACE, TO ENGAGE WITH A SURREAL WORK TITLED SPOOL, THE CREATION OF MELBOURNE ARTIST LIZ RÁCZ AND FRENCH EXPERIMENTAL COMPOSER JÉRÔME NOETINGER.

Entering the space, gallery visitors are given torches and offered a shot of liqueur. Navigating Lupa Art at 3am is much like inhabiting that half-lucid state between waking and sleeping, and this unusual sensation is augmented further by the peculiar sonic and visual instances that viewers/listeners are soon to encounter.

In the centre of a completely blackened room our torches reveal an aged piano, perched on an old worn rug, its top opened, a tape loop feeding into a player concealed inside. The sounds emanating from within—unfamiliar and non-naturalistic sonic swells and events—create an air of uncertainty, the audience unable to anchor them to a source. The palette of almost tactile hisses creates an atmosphere that is at once thin and wispy, yet all the while filling the air with an inescapable misty density. This blanket of sound is then layered with intermittent rising waveforms that build gradually only to be cut dramatically, the result resembling the hissing of a reversed recording of the striking of cymbals. The visibility of the tape assures gallery visitors of the recorded nature of the sound, yet the ambiguity of its content provokes questions, What is this a recording of? And what is the meaning of this recording's unnerving surroundings?

After circling the piano, the audience soon notices, with their torches, a dilapidated sink at the rear of the space. Beside it sits another tape deck playing the same tape loop material. Navigating the room further, they discover small, finger-sized markings that have been produced by erasing the graphite covering the walls. Frenetic sketches of horses and other figures cover the ceiling. The gradual discovery of these markings in the dark, with the invevitable pre-dawn drowsiness and the dense sonic atmosphere, induces in viewers a beautiful sense of revelation.

Spool is an enigmatic and poetic installation, both brooding and surreal. Liz Rácz and Jérôme Noetinger have managed to create an immersive environment that is at once engulfing and ripe with a multitude of subtleties, transporting its audience into an uninhabited space of sonic and visual peculiarities and ambiguity.


Spool, visuals Liz Rácz, sound loops Jérôme Noetinger, Lupa Art, Melbourne, June 22-29, www.lupaart.blogspot.com

RealTime issue #86 Aug-Sept 2008 pg. web

© Jared Davis; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]

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