The Structures Of Everyday Life: Full Circle, 2012

Susan Stenger - London, UK

Sound Installation

Stenger's art focuses on both process and architecture, exploring formal structures that, when activated, reveal a hidden poetry. From the minimalist rock music of Band Of Susans (1986 – 1996) to her 2006 MOCA Lyon commissioned 96-day Soundtrack for an Exhibition, she has mined the territory between logic and aesthetics, expanding and abstracting simple cells and gestures to achieve richly complex results.

Full Circle integrates Western music and Eastern philosophy by connecting the harmonic Circle of Fourths with the Taoist concept of Yin and Yang, marking both the birth and death of John Cage (1912-1992).

A bandstand is transformed in to an intimate zone of slowly swelling and subsiding chords, drawing listeners in to its henge-like ring of speakers to communally experience its sound and shape. The evocative cadential structure resonates and repeats in a different key and instrument/voice every 30 minutes, delicately balancing a sense of stasis with a feeling of forward momentum.

The installation unfolds on multiple scales during its dusk to dawn rotation, referencing clock time, lunar waxing and waning, seasonal celestial cycles and the Chinese zodiac; it embodies the unity of constancy and change reflected in the I Ching while unleashing a true music of the spheres.

Stenger was born in Buffalo, NY, where she studied classical flute and experimental music at SUNYAB. She later joined Petr Kotik's SEM Ensemble and began composing and working with Phill Niblock and Rhys Chatham. She was a founding member of the seminal guitar group Band Of Susans and all-bass art band Big Bottom. She currently lives in London, England, and has created new work for MOCA Lyon, Dublin's Analog Festival, Sketch Gallery, London Word Festival, Faster Than Sound, AV Festival, and the Michael Clark Dance Company.

Learn More

www.susanstenger.co.uk
www.thewire.co.uk/details/artists/?artist=4553
www.forma.org.uk/archive/2006/exhibitions/soundtrack

90

St. James Park, 120 King Street East

This project is outdoors.