"Silence, Please" a site-specific installation + intervention by Chris Kubick
ONE DAY EVENT: Sunday, January 24, 1 - 4pm
Oakland History Room
Oakland Main Public Library
2nd Floor
125 14th Street
Oakland, CA 94612
Public Trans: BART Lake Merritt Station (5 short blocks) or 12th Street City Center (7 long blocks)
Project Description: "Silence, Please" is site-specific installation created by Chris Kubick presented in collaboration with Invisible Venue for the Oakland History Room in the Main Oakland Public Library. Drawing from time spent in locations around the city, Kubick has created a catalog of the names of "sounds which border on silence", empty or unnoticed sounds which are often ignored or mistaken for silence.
This catalog, written out on transparencies, attempts to represent peace, tranquility, emptiness, but is inevitably a record of the disturbances and fantasies that interrupt the notion of silence. Visitors will be able to view and manipulate layers of these transparent silences on an array of light boxes in the Oakland History Room. A copy of the catalog will be entered into the library inventory, inserted in the audio book section, and made available for checkout.
In this work, the artist codifies sound in the form of text and creates a "silent" aural portrait of Oakland through accumulated observations of sounds that are ambient to the extent that they woven into our perceptions of silence--when in actuality true silence is elusive and largely unobtainable. In our quietest, calmest moments--those that we largely consider as relative silence--we still perceive any number of sound or noise to varying degrees, such as the sound of rain falling or the distant hum of a plane in the sky. As an installation in the Oakland History Room, juxtaposed with the stacks for poetry and music history, Kubick's work provides an alternative consideration of Oakland and earmarks this specific moment in its history through a collection of its 'silences' relative to Oakland culture, community, and industry. As text-based investigations, both the installation and the catalog further provide alternative conceptual considerations of audio material. The catalog is produced in a signed and numbered edition. Contact christian@invisiblevenue.com for print details and availability.
Chris Kubick is an artist, composer and sound designer whose work generally traces the edge that separates sense from non-sense, signal from noise, representation from formlessness. Much of his recent work deals with the meanings associated with "sound effects", those sounds that are seemingly not "sound" enough to simply be called sounds. He comes to this work in part through a long and happy association with the dark corners of B-movie Hollywood, having spent more than a little time designing sounds for movies that you'd probably never want to see (Black Cadillac, Flatland, the Bloody Deep, etc.), and a few that you really should see if you get the chance (What America Needs, It's Not My Memory of It, We Will Live To See These Things). He is also the founder and director of Language Removal Services, and has collaborate with artist Anne Walsh on numerous projects, including the Art After Death series of cds. His artwork has been seen and heard at venues around the world, the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the New Museum (New York), MOCA (Los Angeles), VAG (Vancouver), the Royal College of Art (London), among others, and also on public radio in the U.S., Canada, the U.K, and Germany.
With thanks to Anne Walsh, Aaron Stienstra, Stuart Provine, Kathleen Leles DiGiovanni and the staff of Oakland Public Library, Sarah Filley, Michael Damm, Kerri Johnson and Blankspace Gallery, Chuck Mobley and SF Cameraworks, Hilair Chism and Scott Oliver.
