In a show up through June 28, TRANSMISSION GALLERY is presenting works by Stephen Viteillo and Paul Thulin. Stephen Vitiello is exhibiting several LFO speaker drawings and a new sound piece titled “Slow Rewind”. Paul Thulin is showing photographs from his series, ‘Dissolving Boundaries of the Self: A Rhizomatic Psycho-History’.

Stephen Vitiello

‘The LFO Speaker Drawings were created after several years of looking for a method of ‘process drawings’ that would directly reflect my processes of working with audio. Beginning in 2004, I created a number of installations with suspended speakers, through which very low frequency tones were played. The tones and patterns are below our (human) threshold of hearing, therefore we can see movement on the surface of the speakers but we do not actually hear the sounds. The first piece of this series was installed at SculptureCenter in NYC in 2004. Subsequent versions were presented in Rome, Paris, Porto Alegre, Brazil, Seattle, Sydney, Australia and Vienna. In 2006, after a collaboration with the visual artist Julie Mehretu in which she created a wall drawing in a shared space with a suspended speaker piece, I was more determined than ever to make my sounds draw. I found that filling those same speakers with pigment, ink and other drawing materials and subjecting the speakers to those low frequency oscillations (LFO), the drawing materials would be projected out onto paper in such a way that one had a visual work that was also an artifact of the sound. The drawings were first shown in a solo exhibition at The Project on W. 57th Street in New York City and have subsequently been presented in London and are now in the homes of a number of private collectors.

As a compliment to the drawings, I will create a quiet sound piece, on the 1957 children’s book Listen to the Night consisting of sounds created in James River State Park.’

Paul Thulin

‘My defining project Dissolving Boundaries of The Self: A Rhizomatic Psycho-History aims to explore the relationship between photographic narrative and an ongoing autobiographical record of my life. The sequencing and plot of this mythical narrative is thematically linked to historical, psychoanalytical, and confessional self -examination.

Dissolving Boundaries of The Self: A Rhizomatic Psycho-History is a sequential archive of imagery that presents an ever-evolving history of my psyche as photographic artifact. Performance and improvisational play are essential components of this project allowing for the transformation of real world events and personal experiences into plot driven character development, gesture, and aesthetic.  The images are metaphorical expressions of my everyday thoughts, emotions, memories, cultural influences, physical impulses, and other illusive subconscious desires.  The narrative is continually unfolding and sequentially restructuring itself in direct relation to my interpretation of present and past personal experiences.  

The series is structured as a rhizomatic narrative organized and presented by an imagined but systemically real Institute of the Self (IOS). Utilizing psychoanalytically based textual analysis, archeological image structure, and the power of authoritative authorship, this collection of images is archived as a living collection of interpreted artifacts discovered within the boundaries of an examined life.  The series attempts to expose the often contradictory and relative nature of truth offered within any documentary interpretation or examinationof the self and/or culture as a whole.’