On the Cover:
kelli rae adams, Forever in Your Debt (detail), 2019–ongoing. View of installation at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, Washington, DC. Photo: © Llewellyn Hensley
Editor’s Letter:
Manifesting the intangible: If I had to discern a latent theme running through these pages, that would be it. Of the five artists featured here, four work with sound or music. For some, the audible is central to their practice. In a fascinating interview in this issue, Tarek Atoui explains that his “works always begin with sound, and sound leads to the choice of materials that best suit the acoustic properties I am looking for.” Sound is also a dominant aspect of Camille Norment’s sculptural installations, but she starts with the room itself: “Every architectural space has its own voice,” she says. “In ‘Plexus,’ I mapped the primary resonant frequencies, or voices, of both rooms and used those frequencies as the palette from which I would compose the sonic experiences.” Similarly, for Oliver Beer, “acoustic resonance…is a key material,” as his interviewer, Beth Williamson notes, and Beer, too, is concerned with the resonant note inherent in each room. Hans Op de Beeck, discussing his recent exhibition “The Quiet Parade,” suggests that the included soundscape helps unite the various elements of his monochromatic immersive world, though his work doesn’t always include sound. Op de Beeck also often bodies forth his dreams, giving form to another intangible phenomenon. Rather than sound, kelli rae adams focuses on giving substance to such abstract notions as money and labor—frequently unseen or unnoticed labor—in her visually reverberant installations. The happy conjunction of these magnificent artists reminds us that, whether consciously or not, the task of art is frequently to give shape to the shapeless, to concretize the abstract—to, in other words, make us see what is there but not always visualized. —Daniel Kunitz, Editor-in-Chief
