The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Showing: 4-30 June, 2015
Opening: 4th June, 6-8pm
Facebook event
Mishearings, by Jo Burzynska (aka Stanier Black-Five), is a collection of sound-based installations that use the interaction of the senses to alter or intensify perceptions through the combination of sensory stimuli. Burzynska draws both on her own studies in sound and taste and current psychological research into crossmodal correspondences. These have shown that the senses can have a powerful influence over each other, with the conceptual elements of each exhibit achieved or intensified by employing auditory illusions.
In Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices Burzynska presents an audio-visual poem that can be perceived in three ways that offer up very different meanings. This uses the “McGurk Effect”, an illusion that occurs when the auditory component of one word is paired with the visual component of another, leading the viewer to perceive a third different word. Bittersweet is a work for 8 speakers and chocolate. This soundscape, created from the sounds of food production, cycles between low pitched industrial drones and high pastoral frequencies, which change the perception of the flavour of the chocolate from bitter to sweet.
The brain’s ability to construct meaning through noise is harnessed in Poetry as I need it, an exploration of sound, silence, form and time using John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing. And all the senses entwine in Carbonic oscillation, a chamber offering a highly visceral experience of effervescence, which participants are encouraged to experience with a glass of sparkling wine.
Burzynska will also be hosting a series of multisensory events over the month of the exhi-bition:
Thursday 4 June (6pm) – Opening event: featuring Carbonic Oscillation in the bar
Saturday 13 June – Oenosthesia III: artist talk and live sound and wine performance
Sunday 14 June – Wine and music matching workshop at the New Zealand Boutique Wine Festival, Auckland
Friday 19 June – Wine and music matching workshop
Saturday 27 June – Sensation: a multisensory dining experience: collaboration between Burzynska, chef, Alex Davies (Shop Eight) and visual artist, Toshi Endo
Jo Burzynska – who also records and performs under the name Stanier Black-Five – is a Christchurch-based sound artist and wine writer whose work in these areas has increas-ingly converged in the production of multisensory art. Her installations and performances regularly combine sound and taste, created at the intersection of the senses. Recent work includes the public installations Resonifying the city in Cathedral Square, Christchurch (2014); 150 years of rail at Ferrymead Heritage Park in collaboration with Chris Reddington (2013); Stepping Out in Colombo Street, Christchurch (2013) and Oe-nosthesia at the Intereferenze FARM Festival in Tufo, Italy (2012).
Burzynska’s audio work is largely based on the manipulation of her own environmental re-cordings and has been performed and released internationally. Live performances include major festivals, such as the London Musicians Collective’s annual Festival of Experimental Music in the UK to New Zealand’s Lines of Flight Festival. Recent album releases include Body Waves and Avast! on the European Entr’acte label. As a writer on music, she has contributed to the likes of the UK’s The Wire magazine and wrote a chapter of the book Erewhon Calling: experimental sound in New Zealand. As a wine critic, she writes one of New Zealand’s most widely read weekly columns for the New Zealand Herald’s Viva magazine.
She is one of the founders of The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery, where she curates The Auricle’s “oenosthetic” wine list, in which she matches wines to the current exhibition and the music playing in the space.
More information about Burzynska’s sound art can be found at stanierblackfive.com and wine writing at joburzynska.com.
For further details, pictures or to book a place at any of the events, contact {This email is obscured. Your must have javascript enabled to see it}
Photography © Marine Aubert