JEFF TALMAN STUDIO

Artist Statement

The fugitive moment is source to sonic minutiae ignored and relegated to passing time. These moments, a negative space of memory, are awash in an aural backdrop, a "negative sound," the sonic framework of the spaces we inhabit. On these frameworks we perceive and make ‘normal’ or 'positive' sounds - speech, music, and others. But these under-examined backgrounds root us in place and may serve to engender the emergence of recollection. They are always available, if vague or unobserved.

An installation's reiterated sonic resonance shifts focus to these aural backdrops while necessarily referencing the space. Metaphor-laden sounds (cosmic, the sea, snow fall) might alternately be prepared to trigger site resonance to support human spatial awareness. The installation-enhanced spatial aural awareness charges continued visual senses of the space. By invoking a higher level of consciousness of resonant background, the sonic apparentness of space and increased sense of self in relation to sound-space become available.

In addition to existent spatial contexts, these phenomenal systems are art vehicles interlaced with conceptual, metaphoric, formal and expressive art potential. The sonic phenomena, in relation to space, exhibit gesture and moment form. They are choreographed, embracing space-time, dynamic movement (panning, amplitude, frequency), stasis and point location. They are all-over fields inhabiting four-dimensional space, while sometimes invoking historical space – as though the walls could speak – in inviting the perceiver to encounter the self-manifest site environment.

The installation sounds engage human rhythms, rates of motion and visual engagement. Beyond heartbeat and blinking, more importantly the work engages complex human perceptual and gestural norms, for example, the gesture of sweeping the arm across a cathedral interior while visually tracking the view beyond the arm's movement. These rates are flexible and give a wealth of possibility via human scale — in relation to site scale, simultaneity of multiple signals (counterpoint), and possible nuanced variance not unlike the gestures of an orchestra director.

A field of body-conscious, literally and illusionistically (panning) moving, sound activates the space in a quasi-symphonic music composition while engaging the stationary or peripatetic body. At apex, these crafted works address their concepts, forms and metaphors in an expressive realization on human scale while also sharing in the awe of overwhelming sites. An installation becomes an indivisible, reflexive art object, an open-ended self-performance/experience – a time machine at the intersections of sound, architecture, space, object and self – non-existent without the space and that revealed within its ambient silence.