Our Nature2 x CD-R
68:16
Edition of 10 signed + numbered (out of print)
2007
Tracks
Disc 1
1. Inside
Disc 2
1. Outside
Description
Our Nature is a collaborative piece by artists Yann Novak and Gretchen Bennett. Each artist's work involves a cataloging and documenting of their daily surroundings and a translation of the emotional and psychological impact their environments have on them. By removing these objects, images and sounds from their natural habitats, they produce distilled facsimiles of their experiences and, through further refinement, reflections of their personal experience.
In Our Nature, Bennett and Novak turn the lenses and mics on each other. Living in identical lofts in the Tashiro-Kaplan, one above the other, the artists filter their creative practices through the spaces they live in and explore the similarities and differences in both their experience of life in that particular building, as well as the surrounding neighborhood. Presenting this work at Soil Art Gallery is an intricate part of the artists' vision. Located just four floors down from the artists' residences, Soil embodies the cooperative aspects of the community in which they live and work.
Novak accesses Bennett’s world and practice through two on location sound recordings. The first recording was made in the center of Bennett's empty loft and catches the subtle acoustic signatures of the space created by the actual architecture and the way Bennett chose to personalize it. The second recording was taken from the windowsill catching the unique urban sounds Bennett experiences each day. Novak explores the push and pull the neighborhood has on his fellow artist by altering these two recordings and uses the Gallery itself as the battleground. Presented as a 4.2 installation, the two recordings replicate an internal and external struggle for prominence. The speakers positioned in the center of the space play the altered internal recording, while the speakers positioned near the windows and entrance of the gallery play the contrasting external recording. The effect is harmonious competition for acoustic real estate, mimicking Bennett's everyday life.
This double CD was created for collectors as a way to experience Novak’s Audio contribution to the piece outside an installation setting. Each disc contains two of the four channels mastered for regular stereo listening and are divided into Inside and Outside.
Published by Dragon's Eye Recordings (Installation001)
Reviews
Gretchen Bennett and Yann Novak’s identical apartments sit atop one another in the Tashiro-Kaplan building. In "Our Nature", now showing in the SOIL gallery downstairs, the artists use that proximity to create portraits of each other. Bennett reproduces key functional and decorative objects from Novak’s apartment with grey contact paper suggestive of shadows, capturing what Bennett calls his “minimal aesthetic.” In three works, Speaker, Three Laptops, and Lamp + iPod, the delicately cut wires of Novak’s appliances disappear into the gallery walls. Plant + Buddha hints at a more spiritual disposition while Shelves, devoid of Novak’s books and CD’s, remains patently neutral. Novak is primarily a sound artist, and to portray Bennett, he recorded ambient urban noise from her windowsill and the interior sound of her empty loft space. Modifying the recordings to heighten their emotional impact, he placed speakers in the center and periphery of the gallery, producing an aural representation of the artist. I ask Novak if his sound composition, which is melodious without being obviously repetitive, could be anyone else. “Absolutely not,” he replies.
– Suzanne Beal (Weekly Wire, The Seattle Weekly)
"Our Nature," the collaborative piece by Gretchen Bennett and Yann Novak, showing at Soil Gallery, features sound and images that the artists made of each other's living/work spaces in the artist lofts four floors up from the gallery in the Tashiro-Kaplan.
That could seem insular -- or at least reclusive -- if the two artists in question weren't so obsessed by mental and emotional landscapes.
In Novak's case, his installations feature microsounds that he remixes into expansive soundscapes. Bennett uses stickers and decals to explore viral migration, place and mobility. Her work captures the slippage of being between places.
For this show, Bennett photographed objects in Novak's apartment and created stickers that are placed on the gallery walls of his computer, book shelves, speakers, an iPod. The pale gray decals nearly blend into the white walls.
Novak's hourlong four-channel recording of sounds from Bennett's loft fills the room. The street noise of buses, foot traffic and car horns outside Soil blends into the installation much as it did on the artists' previous collaboration "East River Project," a walking tour featuring a bicoastal sound piece using street noise and stickers from Seattle and Brooklyn to conjure the locales by flipping coasts.
– Nate Lippens (Sound + images = ‘Our Nature, The Seattle Post-Intellegencer)