Regan Wheat
THE COLOR OF THE TABLE
installation
I began this work after reading John Cage's "Lecture on Nothing" and "Lecture on Something". These writings explore the relationship between sound and silence within a structure, and the ways in which "the words make/help make the silences". The text and the spaces inform and engage each other and shape the manner in which something, nothing, and everything are communicated.
In this series of drawings, I work with found images and non-active spaces. I remove the images from their culturally-specific contexts and the non-active spaces from their structure. By de-contextualizing the images and the blank spaces from their referent, I expose the silences of "nothing" hiding in plain site alongside the sounds of "something". I work within the given structure of the daily newspaper - within its content of struggle, violence, fear, anger, and desire. By removing the images from their specific stories and the unused spaces framing the information, I re-constitute and re-present what is also always present in the daily bombardment of information - the pauses, the silences, the spaces of non-action, the places outside of relational positioning, outside of culturally-specific codes. My intention is to shift the focus from the unending blare of the sound of "action" and to find the silences of "non-action" within the everyday voice of the newspaper. (Regan Wheat)
Regan Wheat works mainly with sculpture and drawing.
She has participated in several workshops in Europe and South Africa. She has exhibited in Europe and USA, and her works are part of the Daimler-Chrysler collection in Detroit.
She currently lives in Florence, where she teaches drawing, and she is director of Washington University St. Louis Sam Fox School of Visual Art & Design.
POST ELETTRONICA
curated by Valentina Gensini and Letizia Renzini
In tribute to John Cage, the project POST ELETTRONICA investigates territories of "post-electronic" experimentation revealing Cage’s contemporary inheritance and presenting artists who share a dramatic and gestural use of new technologies. Hybrid works that combine music, video, performance, sculpture, sound, noise become vocabularies of a composite language in which the management of advanced software is combined with the artifact in an attempt to dissolve the conceptual approach towards the involvement of the viewer.