Curated by
Sebastian Gonzalez Quintero (MFA ’21 Film/Video)

Sound shapes our experience, enveloping us in sonic atmospheres that we instinctively use to understand the world. In Uncommon Atmospheres, four interdisciplinary artists use sound as a sensing modality to investigate the environmental media of air and water, infrastructures such as national borders, and the materiality of soundscapes on other planets.

By recording, measuring, amplifying, enhancing, sculpting, and distorting sound, Uncommon Atmospheres transforms the gallery into a space for sonic experimentation. Bolor Amgalan explores the resonances of the traditional Mongolian musical instrument Morin Khuur across a Martian environment through simulations and material experiments. Sebastian Gonzalez Quintero brings to the surface the unfamiliar underwater soundscapes of the Charles River, a body of water in an industrial-urban environment. Paula Martin Rivero engages with the auditory traces of borders, listening to the U.S.-Mexico border at San Ysidro Point of Entry, the busiest land border crossing in the Western Hemisphere. Chucho (Jesús) Ocampo experiments with kites as vibratory instruments to experience the dynamics of air and wind in urban and rural environments. Collaboratively, the artists also develop a site-specific installation, engaging and experimenting with the background noises of the gallery. 

The artists in this exhibition draw connections between sound as a source of information, a material, an environmental indicator, and an atmospheric scaling device, raising questions about politics and borders, heritage and the exploration of unknown territories, climate change and the environment, and the incommensurability of planetary phenomena.

VIEW FULL LIST OF ARTWORKS + PRICES HERE