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NY Arts has its eye on artist Wes Kline. Kline will take on ArtCenter/South Florida, the cultural epicenter of South Beach’s Lincoln Road that welcomes more than 100,000 visitors per year. The center is extending his exhibition MINOTAUROCRACY through March 17 as part of Subtropics XXII: Miami’s Biennial of Music and Sound Art. His works are strange, inviting and open to interpretation. |
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Wes Kline, Sleeping (Architect/Theseus), 2012. Archival ink print, 40
x 50 in.
The Sound at South Beach
NY Arts has its eye on artist Wes Kline. Kline will take on ArtCenter/South Florida, the cultural epicenter of South Beach’s Lincoln Road that welcomes more than 100,000 visitors per year. The center is extending his exhibition MINOTAUROCRACY through March 17 as part of Subtropics XXII: Miami’s Biennial of Music and Sound Art. His works are strange, inviting and open to interpretation.
Kline states “The show Minotaurocracy began when I stumbled on a film by the artist Hans Richter that was a kind of propaganda film for a particular type of Modernist architecture. I was inspired to recreate this film, and flew to Zurich and Berlin to photograph and record sound at the same locations as Richter, almost eighty five years after he first filmed them. In a sense, the work that I’m making is an appropriation, a tracing, or a recreation, of Richter’s film.
“For me, including sound that intermittently percolates through the gallery was a way of creating a ‘field’ that unifies the other objects in the space. There are two sounds that are repeated – that of an orchestra tuning, and the phrase ‘simple forms never intrude.’ The first of these sounds emphasizes that the ‘archive’ that I’m presenting is temporary, like music, and is a kind of a ‘rehearsal’ of an archive. The second is a quotation pulled from Hans Richter, which I’m using as a mantra for Modernism. Whether this phrase is a good, bad or ambivalent thing is for the viewer to interpret.”
Wes Kline, Minotaur, 2012. Transparency print, 76 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and ArtCenter/South Florida
“While I was in Switzerland and Berlin, I used microphones to record sounds in and around the buildings that I photographed for the project. These sounds range from children playing to the humming of heating units. For my performances I mix these loops and fragments of sounds live in the gallery, recreating the buildings as ephemeral structures that disappear as they are being built.”
“I like that the audience at ArtCenter/South Florida is both people connected to Miami’s art scene and visitors to Miami, who are ‘migrating’ through the gallery. This itinerant condition echoes some of the migrant qualities I hope to bring out in my work. Miami has such an exciting and experimental art scene, that it’s a real privilege to be part of that dialogue.”
