Chris Kubick
Anne Walsh
Through October 28th - Anne Walsh: An Annotated Hearing Trumpet, Preface and Figures + Chris Kubick: Surprise! at Martina }{ Johnston. I received the full effect of Kubick's piece by sheer coincidence, entering the gallery's screening room just as a chorus of voices shouted out "Surprise!" and various other bells and whistles went off in my ears. Kubick has coded these special moments to occur intermittently and never the same way twice, and as the sounds fill the air their file names flash up on a screen in front of you too. The nomenclature of the files might seem impenetrable to some, but any producer or sound designer will recognize them as the stings and SFX that fill their days. I took a lot of nerdly pleasure from seeing the names pile up on screen and trying to tag them to the specific noises I was hearing.
Walsh's work is more enigmatic but rewards your attention the more time you spend with it. Taking The Hearing Trumpet, a work of surrealist fiction written by Leonora Carrington in 1950, as her springboard Walsh invites us into the machinations of her own head and shows us a seemingly random collection of photographs, notes, cast lists, and other ephemera related to a film Walsh intends to make of the book. Here: pictures of Carrington herself in Mexico City before her death last year, wearing her years and experience with grace. Here: a list of women's names laser-cut into paper, many of them feminist icons of my own. Here: a handwritten address and a scripted conversation. The exhibition is like peering into the creative process itself in all of its messy splendor. As an added bonus I was able to attend a reading by Walsh and Moira Roth at the gallery yesterday, where Walsh alternated her personal observations on Carrington's list of characters from The Hearing Trumpet with Roth's live enactments of sections of the novel. As they spoke I thought of how Carrington seems to be looking forward to her own later years in the book, how women age (fighting it/accepting it), how I want to continue growing older (with the grace and wit of Carrington or Bourgeois or Ono or).
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