Marla Hlady
"Marla Hlady" by Charlene Lau, Spring 2007, pp. 98-102
In the most general sense, I find sound art fun to make but hard to like. It can be densely theoretical and conjure up visions of unmetred noise, percussion or found sound. These aesthetics pervade in this continually experimental medium, often taking cues from musique concrète and John Cage. As neither music nor visual art, sound art becomes a sort of theatre for the ears. It’s difficult to be patient and just listen to non-aesthetic sound without visual aid.
Marla Hlady’s practice consists in part of making sound tangible, sometimes physically placing it directly in the viewer’s hands. Back from a 2005 residency in Iceland, Hlady, in her exhibition at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, presented newly inspired sound objects complemented by ink drawings—in effect balancing object and representation. Icelandic Lullaby and Folksong, from the Mixer series, are martini shakers serving as multi-sensory vessels for auditory and visual display. Inside, light and sound come alive when one picks up the works, with the shaker’s strainer acting as a speaker. Across the room, two teapots rest on a movable table. They clank their lids in accompaniment to Ry Cooder’s music from the film Paris, Texas, as if possessed by a tea-party poltergeist. These pastoral-themed Wah-wah Teapots (Landscape for Alvin Lucier) crankily suggest a soundscape harking back to the salon days of a bygone era. Tea and scones, anyone?
Noisily moving contraptions aside, my real interest lies in Hlady’s ink-on-paper drawings. Here, the aural is transformed into the visual in abstractly notated musical scores. An attempt to visually register these sounds renders them simultaneously delicate and frenetic. Hlady creates a practical visual diagram in sound physics with watery traces of sound paths, shapes and patterns from nature. Tiny arrows swim like tadpoles, some in whirlpools coloured with transparent blue or sepia washes. While a number of drawings recall swirling weather disasters and storms, others look positively planetary, floating in space like the Milky Way. One work resembles a dandelion clock waiting for the wind to blow its seeds away. It’s in works like these that the viewer can really feel sound without physically hearing it. I think to myself: these are made of the things that would make John Cage proud.
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