OPENING: Opens at Devotion Gallery, Friday September 13, 2013
LOCATION: 54 Maujer St at Lorimer. L to Lorimer, G to Metropolitan
(You can also see some of Bethany's visual work reproduced in
Words of Traitors: 7 Lives In Transition.)
Viewers may be familiar with the seminal physics class demonstration in which square steel plates are sprinkled with salt or sand, an electronic musical tone is applied, and through the resultant flexural vibration, a visual representation of the plate's resonant frequency is depicted.
These, "Chladni Figures," are named for musician and physicist Ernst Chladni who in 1787, first ran a violin bow across a brass plate lightly covered in sand and pictorially recorded the waveforms that appeared.
These visual representations of sound are the foundation for Shorb's high-gloss perversion of the ephemeral impermanence that defines traditional sandpainting. In an unlikely crossing of sacred geometry and car culture, rather than brushed away and destroyed after the meditative act or scientific experiment, these granular patterns are instead baked into an impenetrable, industrial polymer on aluminum, kaleidoscopically tessellated and contradictorily blasted with both a diabetic shock of
candy colored hot-rod surface finish and cold, Detroit acerbity.
