ODETTA Gallery, NY
Mute-Ability, Compositions 1-6
Player piano music rolls, colored acrylic sheets, LED backlighting, custom steel brackets, dimensions variable
See-Matics, Voice, Wish, Answer
Acyrlic dots and dashes on acrylic sheet, 9.5" x 22"
In the 6-part installation for the two-person exhibition Illuminated, Yarrington continues her interest in the connections between vision, sound and language. In Mute-ability: Compositions 1 – 6, her title for this light-based comprehensive work, she combines the words mute and malleability. The work focuses on found piano rolls, a music storage medium, originally conceived as coded notations or ‘note control data’ for music produced in pneumatic player pianos. The physical perforations in the paper provide the means by which small bellows move each individual note to produce a range of sounds.
In Yarrington’s malleable variations, the piano rolls have been cut to different lengths then randomly layered between stacked fluorescent-colored plexiglass. Each piece extends from the wall, minimally framed to hold it in place, allowing the work to appear as if floating. The individual units are activated by varying colors and/or brightnesses of LED light strip positioned behind the work. In this configuration, the perforated piano rolls now act as vehicles for light transmissions – the sonorous transposed through illumination.
In the accompanying three flat file drawer installations titled Seematics: Voice, Wish, Answer, a play on the words see, Cymatics (modal vibrational phenomena) and semantics, Yarrington continues her experimentation with visual language derived from sound structures. As if extruded from the piano roll perforations which are comprised of a series of dots and dashes, Yarrington uses plastic rods and columns and Morse Code, another sound and light system, to offer new meaning to words of songs lifted from the sing-along section of the exhibited piano rolls.
-Ellen Hackl Fagan, curator/owner, ODETTA Gallery NY
