19. September 2015
for Groundswell 2015 @ Olana State Historic Site
co-organized by The Olana Partnership and Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM
press release:
“In this site-specific installation for Groundswell 2015, Brooklyn-based, Austrian-born sound artist Bernd Klug turns a section of Frederic Church’s estate Olana into an interactive instrument on the threshold of listening. With musical strings, Klug draws a multi-dimensional network through the trees at the switchback conjoining Ridge Road with Bethune Road.
The picturesque pastoral landscape and Church’s three-dimensional painting approach provide a container for Klug’s three-dimensional drawing space, which invites thinking and reflection. With no amplification or electronic manipulation, the strings will hardly sound, responding only to the wind and other environmental factors. This near-silence invites the visitor to ask what there truly is to see and hear, and what these sensory perceptions mean. How do seeing and hearing define our surroundings actively and passively?
The strings will form a mesh using trees as their nodes and vague locations (connected to this specific event, the involved institutions, the artist, and his recent projects) to locate and dislocate the artwork and present us with the quest of perceiving a forest as a view beyond the artist’s (whether Church’s or Klug’s) imagination. ”
