The Pierrot Studio: Music. Art. Sound. Light. Performance. An exhibition supporting emerging artists and reaching new audiences
The Pierrot Studio
5 – 17 February 2016
Concert Opening: 4 February 2016
Performances begin at 18:30
Display Gallery, 26 Holborn Viaduct, London, EC1A 2AQ
The Pierrot Studio brings together sculpture, cutting edge music, light, sound, strobe and performance into one harmonious space: an exhibition that allows the worlds of visual art and classical music to collide through a series of collaborative installations and concerts.
Three artists and three composers will work together to create visual/aural artworks inspired by 20th Century visionary Arnold Schönberg. Each pairing will explore thematic elements of Schönberg’s seminal song cycle ‘Pierrot Lunaire’. The Dr. K Sextet will perform the new compositions written for each installation at the opening of the exhibition.
Tim A Shaw and Ewan Campbell will take Schönberg’s study, or studio, as their starting point and will construct a skeleton, life size timber frame replica of this room, based upon photographs of the composer at work. Rather than presenting a stable or fixed piece of architecture, the installation will be much more akin to a psychic, virtual or imagined shell. The immersive room will include re-imaginings of Schönberg’s ‘musical’ sketches and painted self portraits.
Sara Naim and Chris Roe will create a poetic and transient rendering of Schönberg’s moonscape in ‘Pierrot Lunaire’. Roe’s composition will be amplified beneath a shallow vessel of milk. As the speakers reverberate with the varying tones and frequencies of the music, the liquid will begin to ripple and embody the sound through the various geometric patterns that appear in it. Naim will illuminate the milk with a strobe every 13 seconds in reference to Schönberg’s notorious triskaidekaphobia. She will create a series of frozen, sculptural moments, between which the audience will wait in darkness, absorbing the sound without vision.
Jörg Obergfell and Stef Conner will look specifically at the absurdist nature of Pierrot Lunaire and create a series of masks and musical motives around the various archetypal Pierrot characters. Conner’s compositions will be interwoven around a central, slowly developing theme of laughter. Obergfell will translate these characters into more or less abstract mask forms that draw inspiration from both folk costumes and modernist aesthetics.
The exhibition is programmed by The Pierrot Project, an arts collective that encourages interdisciplinary collaboration between artists, composers and musicians.
The Cross-Eyed Pianist 