Preview: Steve Roden's collections at the Contemporary
An intuitive, moody arrangement of music-related photographs and quotations that evoke the mystery and wonder of auditory experience
Los Angeles-based artist Steve Roden has worked in an overwhelming variety of forms throughout his career, creating everything from conceptual recordings and sound installations to color field paintings and experimental films. For his latest project, Roden has teamed up with Atlanta-based record label and publisher Dust-to-Digital to release a book and two cds culled from his extensive collections of early photographs and 78 rpm recordings.
Dust-to-Digital let CL take a peek at the book, “i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces”, earlier this week. The work is neither narrative nor necessarily thematic, but an intuitive, moody arrangement of music-related photographs and quotations that evoke the mystery and wonder of auditory experience.
Roden writes on the nature of collecting in an introductory essay, saying "for who among us who is a collector, has not at one time or another sat in the throes of loneliness, melancholy or suffering, and held a communion of sorts with a record or two: one sits alone, listening in a darkened room, as the music floats, notes like a mass of moths, directed towards ears, as if a brightly lit pair of light bulbs in the night. as a group of favorite sounds enter us they move quickly to our souls and our insides are mended a little... even if it is only for an evening."
Lance and April Ledbetter of Dust-to-Digital will present the work this Sat., Mar. 19 at 11 am at the Contemporary. More images from the book after the jump.