Sound and Music

Craig Burston & Joe Evans
Systems out of Chance

The Parfitt Gallery is pleased to present ‘Systems out of Chance’ an audiovisual installation by Craig Burston and Joe Evans. As a graphic image maker, Craig Burston has often explored the lost and fragmented and democratic technologies. A previous project credited to skip-rat designs, the small press volume Talking Bread Heads, documented the everyday and the overheard or the ‘raw lumps of thought’ that we expose one another to. Joe Evans’ work under the name ‘runningonair’ is an amalgam of melody, tone, mechanical rhythms, found sound and even spam e-mails. A chance meeting and a shared interest in the imposition of systems upon the random or chaotic has developed into their first collaboration.

Burston’s visual triptych offers a record of lost or discarded gloves (photographs taken with the ubiquitous camera phone), textural descriptions and an informational colour field, in reference to the dominant colours within each photograph. Positioned so that it is impossible to view all three depictions at once, the viewer engages with the interdependent images whilst simultaneously experiencing the auditory interpretations, calling at once upon immediate thoughts, memories and unspoken descriptions.

Evans’ musical triptych was written as three separate parts to be experienced singularly or as one whole. The musical score is not simply a soundtrack; it has an equitable co-dependent relationship with the imagery. The first part was written via the employment of a mathematical system (the Fibonacci sequence dictating time and notes) combined with his emotive response to the photographs. In turn this influenced the second series of images and the cyclic response between seen and heard resulted in three audiovisual constructs that are equitable in status to one another.

The scored music creates the environment in which to view each piece. By evoking sensations alluding to the melancholic, the music furthers the emotion of the imagery. The cacophony of image and sound produces a temporal experience, one where the viewer becomes aware of their own position within the space.

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC MON - FRI 10am - 6pm