Outside/In

Outside In: Phil Peters and Karen Reimer
September 22 – November 10, 2019

“Outside In is an exhibition doubling as an occasion to survey contemporary sound-based art having field recordings at its base. As an inaugural gesture, Outside In will reverse Radio Recorders role as a studio. Instead of producing, documenting and ultimately distributing sounds produced on site, this exhibition, as its title suggests, will bring sounds from the outside in. Toward that end, Outside In, in addition to being an exhibition, will also consist of three evenings of deep listening devoted to experimental field recordings. These listening sessions, which will at times feature live musical accompaniment, will take place over the course of the exhibition. As a standing exhibition, Outside In consists of two monumental components, one sound, the other visual. The latter, by Chicago-based artist Karen Reimer, is a quilted canopy of hand dyed indigo fabric that will cover the entire ceiling area of the gallery. The former, by Phil Peters, is a sound installation utilizing six custom subwoofers designed to play recordings he made by burying microphones at drilling and fracking sites in west Texas. Between the devil and the deep blue sky is the phrase that best sums up the relationship between these components, Reimer’s being a radical reconfiguration of an existing work and Peter’s being a new production.”

Hamza Walker, curator