Material Sound brings together a group of contemporary artists who each create an experience of sound within installations and apparatus constructed from everyday materials.

Curated by Dr Caleb Kelly and developed by the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), Material Sound features newly commissioned work by artists Vicky Browne, Pia van Gelder, Caitlin Franzmann, Peter Blamey, Vincent and Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Ross Manning, whose work and practice investigates sound and materials within art and performance.

Material Sound has emerged from Caleb Kelly’s ongoing engagement with sound in contemporary practice. Over a 20-year period, Kelly has developed an acute sensitivity to how sound shapes our experience of art. His research, writing and exhibition projects encourage us to move our attention beyond the visual to embrace a more complete bodily experience of the work we encounter in art spaces.

Sound is often thought of as immaterial and while perpetually present – there is no such thing as true silence – it is frequently neglected. A visual experience will commonly be afforded primacy over an aural one. Recently the contemporary arts have turned to sound and in doing so have incorporated a greater spectrum of the senses.

If we accept that sound is an encounter with a sound wave – one that has a physical effect on our body – then our attention can turn to the circumstances that produced that sound through the material that produced it. The artists in Material Sound lay this process bare for us. Their artworks invite us to observe and in some cases, participate in, the mechanics of sound production and appreciate the physicality of sound. Employing handmade instruments and electronics, recycled electronic components, outmoded or fake technologies, imagined sounds and silence, the works form a series of dynamic installations that challenge the way we think about materiality in a cumulative sound experience.
 

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Museums & Galleries of NSW is pleased to be working in partnership with Dr Caleb Kelly and MAMA to present the regional tour of Material Sound. The exhibition was shown at MAMA from 9 February to 29 April 2018 and will also travel to Black Mountain College Museum & Art Centre in Asheville, North Carolina, USA in mid-2019 before touring nationally in Australia from 2020.
 

Manning Regional Art Gallery, NSW	29 September – 8 November 2020
Warrnambool Art Gallery, VIC	21 November 2020 – 14 February 2021
Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, TAS	7 June – 25 July 2021
Bayside Gallery, VIC	17 September – 14 November 2021
Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, NSW	27 November 2021 – 16 January 2022
Hervey Bay Regional Gallery, QLD	4 February 2022 – 3 April 2022
NorthSite Contemporary Arts, Cairns, QLD	23 April- 19 June, 2022
Artspace Mackay, QLD	2 July – 28 August 2022
Maitland Regional Art Gallery, NSW	10 September – 27 November 2022

The tour is across 9 art museums and four states over the next three years.

More information