Installation view, Matt Rogalsky: When he was in high school... (1998). Collection of the artist. Credit: Stephen Wild, 2006
Exhibitions
Matt Rogalsky: When he was in high school in Texas, Eric Ryan Mims used a similar arrangement to detect underground nuclear tests in Nevada
The Davies Foundation Gallery
21 January - 14 May 2006
A spot-lit span of floor in The Davies Foundation Gallery serves as a surrogate for the 1960s suburban basement conjured up by the title of this exhibition. Inspired by a science-project booklet published by Radio Shack under the authorship of Forrest M. Mims III, Matt Rogalsky's elegant audio installation takes the form of a tangle of circuit-boards and sensors registering minute vibrations of the gallery floor. The readings are processed into an accumulating density of audio clicks, which are archived and broadcast, in turn, as ambient sound. The installation poignantly touches on our relationship with the environment, the widening band of surveillance, the sweet DIY hobbyist aesthetic, and the productive capacity of the dilettante artist-scientist - and the resilient life of this impulse in the probing curiosity of the adolescent nerd - and, within all this, ponders the tracery of physical energy that unites all things.
Now based in Kingston, Matt Rogalsky exhibits and performs regularly in Europe and North America. A PhD candidate in Music at City University London (UK), he is an instructor in the Queen's University School of Music. His media art often focuses on abject, invisible/inaudible, or ignored streams of information.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with text by Jan Allen, and a DVD compilation of Rogalsky's electroacoustic installation works, 1989-2004.
Jan Allen