Articulation of Promise, commissioned by Conall Gleeson and Jean Martin on the occasion of the exhibition Peter Vogel: The Sound of Shadows, University of Brighton Gallery, October 2011. The resulting work was exhibited in Six Degrees of Separation, curated by Juan Bolivar, Wimbledon Space, University of the Arts London, 15 February - 15 March 2013.
Articulation of Promise is a work for single screen HD video and is the result of an intervention by the artist into the gallery space made in response to the exhibition Peter Vogel: The Sound of Shadows, which took place at the University of Brighton Gallery, October 2011.
The first electronic musical instruments to emit sound without using physical contact were invented by Leon Theremin in the early 20th century. The first and most well known performers of these instruments were Clara Rockmore and Lucie Bigelow Rosen in the 1930’s and then Lydia Kavina who, taught by Theremin is currently the leading performer of this instrument. Historical photographs of these women playing the Theremin and the Terpsitone are the visual score from which tableaux are created. In these tableaux the performer of an instrument from the past, plays electronic instruments of the present, instruments which themselves have a visual aesthetic reminiscent of early modernism – the interactive sculptures of artist Peter Vogel.The reconstructions in the tableaux embrace what is lost in translation between event, photograph and performer and are not intended to be exact visual representations of the photographs, but attempt to replicate the position of the body and the hands of the performers. These hand and body positions when placed next to the Vogel sculptures sometimes trigger the components in them to move, emit sound or light up. In the conflation of Theremin performer and electronic sculpture, questions are posed about the relationship between an operator and a machine, the coded nature of signals and gestures and effects without an apparent cause.
