Art o Rama | Immaterial Salon
28 August–
13 September 2020
Bosse & Baum is pleased to introduce a new work by Candida Powell-Williams titled Sonic Arrangements in the Infinite Fill (Duality). The work is split across two platforms, both online: ‘Sonic Arrangements in the Infinite Fill (immaterial)’ with Art-o-Rama and ‘Sonic Arrangements in the Infinite Fill (material)’ with Bosse & Baum.
For Sonic Arrangements in the Infinite Fill (immaterial) with Art-o-Rama, we are presenting an audio work: a 20 minute soundtrack which builds on a singular bell ring that is synthesized and layered over itself becoming increasingly urgent, rhythmic and complex. The audio is disembodied from it’s source – a handmade ceramic bell in the shape of a figure which motionlessly rests on a platform elsewhere. The music plays with notions of duality; contrasting meditative sounds with temporal, frenetic and mechanical phrases. The first half of the piece is a slow and passive incantation that becomes disorientating as it develops, playing with echoes and reverbs and warping the bell ring’s cadence. By reversing the reverb the ring mimics breathing whilst the clicking metronome, a sped up heart beat, asserts a sense of order that the music constantly refutes by falling in and out of sync with it. This sound piece was originally conceived to accompany a live performance in Northern Ireland in collaboration with the local based Echo Echo dance company on Derry City Walls and Walker Plinth as part of the artist’s solo exhibition at Void Gallery in 2019. Sound, movement and costume combined to explore the dualism of repelling and attracting, taking the transformation of the city walls from defensive architecture to tourist attraction as the starting point. Likewise, bells historically both repel and attract; they are worn to fend off evil spirits and simultaneously denote the time of worship therefore bringing people to them. The piece finished on the Walker Plinth which was built in 1826 with a 25 m high column of George Walker and then blown up by the IRA in 1973. The hope for the site now is to place temporary works upon it which are universal rather than political.
Video
Candida Powell-Williams
Sonic Arrangements in the Infinite Fill (immaterial), 2019
Sound File – MP3 file, 20 mins 13 seconds
Edition of 10, £300
*With each edition of the sound piece you will
receive a printed certificate of authenticity signed by the artist
Enquire info@bosseandbaum.com
Candida Powell-Willliams creates installations which play with the relationship between sculpture, live performance and animation. Her research–based and process led sculptural practice is guided by questions about human attempts to understand our body in the universe through the connection between objects, action and belief. Powell-Williams’s sculptural landscapes are often a response to researching the slippage that occurs to the meaning of historical artefacts over time, aiming to confront our relationship to memory and storytelling. She manipulates historical narratives, plucking references from disparate eras, folding them into the present and condensing them into a singular experience. Using a range of materials and textures CPW references the vast language of the ever shifting meaning of symbols from architecture, industrial inventions to talisman, rendering them physical in modular forms or prop-like sculptures characterised by their wobbly geometry and apparently dissolving edges. Fabricated in sweet colour gradients the surfaces appear worn down like disneyfied relics. Fleeting performances explore gesture, touch and the permeable boundary of our bodies to the external environment and kinship to the animal kingdom. These interactions are documented in stuttering layered animations permeating the work with notions of time, presence and absence and addressing the changing nature of sculpture, performance and storytelling in the digital age.
Candida Powell-Williams (born 1984, lives in London) graduated from the RCA, London in 2011. Selected exhibitions and performances include: “The Gates of Apophenia,” Bosse and Baum London (2019), “Command Lines,” Void Gallery, Northern Ireland (2019) “Lessness, still quorum,” performance, Serpentine Galleries, London (2018); “Boredom and its Acid Touch,” Frieze Live, London (2017); “Tongue Town,” Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo (2017); “Cache,” Art Night Associate Programme, London (2017); PIC performance festival, Melbourne, Australia (2016); “Coade’s Elixir,” Hayward Gallery, London (2014). In 2018 Powell-Williams was artist in residence at the Warburg Institute London, was awarded the Mother Art Prize in 2018 and in 2013 was recipient of the Sainsbury Scholarship at the BSR, Rome. In 2019 common-editions published Powell-William’s tarot deck and artist book. In 2021 Powell-Williams will have a major new solo exhibition at Southwark Park Galleries London.
