Wednesday, December 13, 7pm {69 Broadway}

Australia-based scholars and artists Caleb Kelly, Pia van Gelder and Peter Blamey will make a rare North American appearance at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center to discuss and perform works that examine the relationship between sound and visual art within the space of the gallery. Kelly will speak about his book Gallery Sound (Bloomsbury 2017) and van Gelder and Blamey will both perform. Asheville’s own Pete Speer from Make Noise will also join them.

$10 regular admission  // $5 BMCM+AC members and students w/ID
Tickets available at the door and through Brown Paper Tickets

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council

Caleb Kelly is an academic, event director and curator working in the area of the sound arts. In his book Gallery SoundKelly examines the role of sound in the gallery experience. Gallery Sound argues for the importance of all sounds heard within the walls of art spaces, and in doing so pays attention not only to the deliberate inclusion of sound within the art gallery in the form of artworks, performances, and music, but also to its incidental ambient sounds, and to the noise generated by audiences. More than this, however, Gallery Sound brings our attention to the ways in which the acoustic characteristics specific to gallery spaces have been creatively mined by artists, ushering in entirely new art forms.

Pia van Gelder is an electronic artist and researcher. Van Gelder’s work involves designing and building electronic instruments that are presented in performance and interactive installation contexts. Her works investigate our relationships with technology and energy. They participate in a kind of visual music, exploring the relationship between music and the visual arts through utilizing the ability to synthesize image and sound as a signal that is one and the same. See video below. 

Peter Blamey’s work explores sound, energies and residues, and the relationships between people, technologies and environments. His practice is typically grass roots and ‘hands-on’, and frequently involves establishing interactions between disparate everyday materials to produce performances, artworks and installations aimed (in part) at reimagining accepted notions of connectivity, variability and use. See video below.

Pete Speer is an artist and musician based out of Asheville, NC.  His work incorporates performance, recording and sound installation, and takes inspiration from the quiet stillness at the center of loud fast things.  Working primarily with the modular synthesizer, Speer’s experimental electronic compositions present field recordings from a world based in voltage.