Multiple Monochromes

BACKGROUND This project is located in sound culture research, particularly sound art that is used to further medium-specific developments in visual arts. This debate is current in MOMA NY's first ever curated sound exhibition Soundings 2013, the Tarrawarra Biennial Sonic Spheres 2012 and scholarly texts like Hirschhorn Museum's Visual Music: Synaesthesia in the Arts 2005. This work in particular asks: how can the monochrome, described as a point zero in painting (Thierry de Duve 1999, Barbara Rose et al 2006), be re-considered through combining painting and sound? CONTRIBUTION The work's contribution is to render the philosophical questioning of the monochrome in painterly and audible form by inverting figure and ground in the visual and the audible compositions. Thus the paintings are painted as large painted surfaces over boards and adjacent wall, which then by removing the centre boards renders the white monochrome of the existing wall as a physicality, despite its immateriality. Likewise the blocky 4-channel composition reframes silent passages as presences to echo the framed white spaces. The notions of framing and reframing of experience, and of nothingness, which lie at the heart of the monochrome project are thus explicitly performed, in effect replying to Robert Irwin's challenge: "How do I paint a painting that doesn't begin and end at the edge?" (Weschler 2009.) SIGNIFICANCE This work was developed on-site for the touring Australian and New Zealand survey exhibition and catalogue. Curated by Dr Caleb Kelly for the Visiting Scholar Programme ("internationally recognised academics") at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, before touring unmodified to City Gallery Wellington. Kelly was the editor of 'Sound' in the well-regarded Whitechapel series. The exhibition itself received funding from Creative New Zealand, the national arts agency, and was finalist in the New Zealand Museum Awards 2013. The Dunedin showing and Graeve's work were reviewed in Realtime 111.