Music
Music for Electric Metronome
by Toshi Ichiyanagi
Performance
Mail Art
Shining Despite the Sh*t
about the art
This month we’re presenting sound and visual art influenced by repetition and iteration; Glimmer, Click, Repeat. We’ve paired performer Richard An’s interpretation of Music for Electric Metronome by Toshi Ichiyanagi with Ingrid V. Wells’s painting, Shining Despite the Sh*t. Together, they bring to light themes of familiarity, the soothing nature of recognizable patterns, and make visible the routines and repetition in our lives that we might not otherwise notice.
Toshi Ichiyanagi’s 1960’s Fluxus graphic score combines structure and freedom by incorporating metronomes—symbols of repetition and rigidity—with sounds, gestures, and musical pathways chosen by the performer. Richard An’s sound film interpretation recasts this piece in the familiar format of a YouTube unboxing video. Richard uses gestures that have been repeated so widely on the internet that they’ve become memes.
Ingrid V. Wells is a painter whose recent work investigates how the elements of art, like color, shape, and subject matter, can affect and improve mood. Her piece, Shining Despite the Sh*t, is part of a series of paintings inspired by the idea of “glimmers,”objects we interact with that make us feel safe, soothed, and connected. The paintings use monochromatic colors and repeated simple shapes to create a visual rhythm and investigate their calming effects on mood.