The UFMG Cultural Center invites you to the opening of the Arte Sonora exhibition, by artists Amir Brito Cadôr and Ulisses Carvalho, next Friday, August 19, 2022, at 7 pm. The exhibition is an overview of the poetic presence of sound as a phenomenon and matter in artistic practices in its visual and tactile aspects and will be on view until September 25, 2022. There will be a performance by Ulisses Carvalho and Pedro Fontenelle at 8:40 pm. Admission is free with free classification.
Occupying the Grande Galeria do Centro Cultural UFMG, the exhibition brings together two simultaneous shows, one collective and one individual, which present different types of sound art.
One of them features publications from the UFMG Artist Book collection, complemented by the 55SP publishing house and private collections; the other, Plástica Sonora, presents works by the artist and researcher Ulisses Carvalho, the result of his research at the Graduate Program in Arts at the UFMG School of Fine Arts, under the guidance of the artist Amir Brito Cadôr.
The group exhibition is jointly curated by Cadôr and Carvalho, who chose works that materialize sound. They are diverse pieces, which have the common characteristic of being edited, found in art galleries, in bookstores or in record stores: magazines and books with audio, artists' records and album covers made by artists, graphic scores and artist books that suggest a score through collages, onomatopoeias or asemic writings.
The representation of sound in artist's books can happen through writing, as in Raquel Stolf's sound typologies, in comic book collages that suggest a score in the work of the artist Christian Marclay, in Montez Magno's drawings on scores, suggesting new sonorities or graphic translations of a sound composition, such as the book Tartamudo that accompanies Yuri Bruscky's album.
Among the artist's albums, the public will be able to discover the works of Antonio Dias, Brígida Baltar, Cildo Meireles, Dieter Roth, Eduardo Kac, Milan Knížák and Vivian Caccuri, as well as works of sound poetry by Alex Hamburger and the Mexican artist Ulises Carrión.
Another highlight of the show are the works created for the album cover, including the famous album by the band The Velvet Underground with cover signed by Andy Warhol and Talking Heads in a special edition created by Robert Rauschenberg.
Scores by Dick Higgins, Neo Muyanga, Jorge Macchi and Mungo Thomson will be on display alongside the score for the piano piece 4'33”, by John Cage, an American composer who was a professor and had a great influence on the artists who began their activities in the 1960s.
In another room in the gallery, Ulisses Carvalho presents two series of two-dimensional works, drawings and serigraphs, which seek to translate sound into graphics.
In the series Impressions Acústicas, images of instruments and fragmented sound objects are superimposed numerous times, shuffling the visuality of the object that reminds us of the acoustic and materiality of the sound-generating object. In Sobrepunho, musical objects are outlined with a pen and the drawings are superimposed.
The set is completed by a sound piece by Carvalho divided into three sequential moments: in Overture (2022) the score is written live adding notes on the musical staff from the action with a drill in a pile of blank scores, exploring the sound of this process.
Soon after, in What is this ruckus? (2022) the artist improvises a musical composition supported by drums (Pedro Fontenelle) and guitar that will serve as a musical background for the construction of Parasita, a sound sculpture produced by the act of drilling the instrument and sawing the sound box.
The sound vibration caused by the action of holes and cuts in the materials tries to play with the rhythmic structure of the improvised musical background. The sound result will later be collected on a vinyl record.