Notations, 2008, An image and sound project
Anne Wilson and Shawn Decker collaboration
Image: 20, 8.25″h x 24″w photographic composites of motion sequences (scores)?
Sound: Audio CD, go to: http://www.shawndecker.com/cd/notations
Excerpt from Sculpture, May 2008, Vol. 27, No. 4, essay entitled “Anne Wilson: New Labor,” pp. 38-43:
“In Notations (which pays homage to the 1969 book of the same name by John Cage and Alison Knowles), Wilson developed a notational system which recorded her repetitive, rhythmic hand gestures as she crocheted and knitted her sculptures. She then composited these numerous motion sequences in digital photographs, producing 20 musical “scores” which hang on a wall. Notations also stands as a collaboration with the Chicago sound artist Shawn Decker, who “read” each of Wilson’s scores and composed accompanying sounds, which echo delicately throughout the space of the installation in an aural interpretation of the physical record of her hand movements. Notations resonates on multiple levels of material meaning — both as a physical artifact of Wilson’s fleeting moment-to-moment gestures in constructing Portable City, and then as Decker’s re-contextualization of that resulting physical score into immersive, fluid sound as sculptural form. Notations proposes a continuous, lyrical shift between the fixed and the fluctuating.”
~ Polly Ullrich, art critic and curator
Notations installation at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, 2008