CAST Gallery
is the lead contemporary visual artist development body in Tasmania and provides presentation and development opportunities and support for professional artists practising innovative art.
"David Chesworth moves away from the large-scale site-specific installations of his and Sonia Leber’s work to produce an intimate listening environment and invites the audience to apprehend the eight-channel works... on their sonic merit. The striking juxtaposition of synthesised and field-recorded sonic environment provides the listener with a fresh auditory perspective on both sound sets while provoking their curiosity about the works’ extra-musical associations.
Oceanography is an almost completely synthesised soundscape that Chesworth describes as suggesting an 'underwater eco-system'. High, diatonic tones shimmer above humming chordal currents, frissons of static, pealing motifs...the characteristically dream-like timbral palette and steady but understated pulse give the work a theatrical quality well beyond immediate surroundings.
After the synthesised sounds of Oceanography, the strictly field-recorded bird and insect calls of Peron Station sound strikingly artificial. The call of the Chiming Wedge-Bill resembles the metallic tinkling of digital artifact in a badly encoded MP3. The White-Winged Fairywren twitters like a tiny super-charged Leslie speaker. Beetle stridulations coalesce in what sounds like a granulated shopping cart. Only the recordings of blowholes and the odd crow betray the natural origin of their unearthly sounds."
(Excerpt with permissions taken from RealTime, 104, August-September 2011).
This project is a partnership between MONA and CAST as part of the MONA FOMA 2012 exhibition program. David Chesworth's 4-channel sound installation, Oceanography/Peron Station, courtesy the artist and Fehily Contemporary.