Wellington artists on Object Lessons

Object Lessons: A Musical Fiction
Fitts & Holderness
DJ $1 Record (aka Bryce Galloway)
Caroline Johnston
Torben Tilly & Robin Watkins
Ronnie van Hout
Curated by Laura Preston & Mark Williams

The Otolith Group: A Long Time Between Suns

7 August–10 October 2010
www.adamartgallery.org.nz

The record is a dissemination device and a visual object, a record of the event in time and a commodification of a moment in history—Bruce Russell

Object Lessons: A Musical Fiction, an exhibition project curated by Laura Preston and Mark Williams, has been conceived in the wake of the digital download. The project investigates the visual forms of music as a way to address issues of documentation and distribution. It is curious about how histories accrue around this object as a material artefact and as a commodity. Intriguingly the music record provides access to the past and yet it implies an inevitable distance from the contexts and circumstances of its production.

The exhibition explicitly focuses on independent music production as a site where the social, economic and political effects of recording are re-negotiated by artists eager to work outside “the system” and usually “off the record”. Here questions of commodification are critically addressed and social and cultural codes are inventively reworked.

The works presented by the artists forecast the future by reconnecting with the past, to resist and reorient the “impending tsunami” of the digital download and the modalities of communication within which music now circulates.

Object Lessons is the second project to be curated for the Adam Art Gallery’s Sound Check research initiative that explores the intersections between music and the visual arts. It is accompanied by a public programme of talks, workshops and performances: http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/current-exhibition/