Splitting the senses

Conor Kelly's Aerophone show cannot be dismissed as simple video art; his three works dizzy the senses and cross boundaries with what could be called 'artistic synaesthesia'. Billy Leahy reports It was with siren drones and blinking belisha beacons that Irish-born, London-based artist Conor Kelly signaled his arrival at the Green on Red gallery last year. Visually eye-catching and sonically arresting with its cacophony of claxon, Kelly's piece was a well-chosen opening work in the Press Play group exhibition, and an appropriate introduction to the artist's mixed-media output for the Irish audience. Combining installation, performance, audio and video, Kelly's work explores the relationship between the moving image and sound, especially within the realm of contemporary art.
Traditionally works such as those produced by Kelly would be automatically filed under video art, but the three pieces that comprise Aerophone, the title of his first solo exhibition in Dublin at the Green on Red, question this simplistic classification. Aerophone is as much, if not more, about the audio as the moving image, with the production methods for the sound dictating the video in at least two of the three works.
For instance, one piece, ‘Pendulum', is comprised of three screens projected side-by-side onto the main gallery wall, which show close-up shots of a microphone swinging to-and-fro hypnotically in front of a loudspeaker cone. Each screen shows the microphone traversing the speaker at a different tempo; so as one shoots across the screen, another lolls leisurely from side to side. As the cone is crossed by each mic, feedback is emitted and this combined with the natural swoosh of the microphone's movement provides the audio for the piece.
For anyone familiar with Steve Reich's 1968 composition Pendulum Music – or Sonic Youth's Goodbye 20th Century, which contains a performance of this seminal piece of minimal process music – this idea will sound extremely familiar. In fact, Kelly's work is practically a homage à Reich – but there does seem to be good reason for this; By using the methods of Reich and combining them with visuals, Kelly moves the piece into his own area of exploration, where the projected visuals, the sound from the loudspeaker and the movement of the microphone interact.
It is this relationship that is central to Kelly's work. The microphone is moving, but it is the monitor that shows this movement, while elsewhere, the movement generates a swooshing sound that with the feedback of the speaker is recorded by the mic. These intricate crossovers and confused boundaries combine and almost mix the senses in what, to coin a term, might be referred to as ‘artistic synaesthesia'. Without doubt this is an interesting exploration, but one wonders if Kelly needed to reference Reich's work so closely, or whether completely fresh means may have served his purposes better.
In ‘Piano Note', Kelly has filmed the repetitive ebony and ivory formation of piano keys, splicing them together to create a seamless loop that toys with musical ideas of repetition and La Monte Young-style minimalism. The silence of this work focuses the viewer primarily on the visual element of the instrument itself, something which is highlighted by the fact there is no trace at all of the piano's purpose – to produce sound and music.
The final work in the exhibition is ‘Note', in which several monitors visually depict a close-up of a bass guitar fret, with the string vibrating and warbling in over-lapping and continuous loops. With so much sonic crossover, it is difficult to work out which television screen is connected to which noise, an element Kelly has undoubtedly carefully considered and constructed.
If this was not enough, all the while the sound of ‘Pendulum' still pulsates in the background, adding to an almost low-level audio assault that has been consciously engineered. If Belisha beacons was an impressive way to trumpet his arrival, Kelly has furthered his reputation in his home town with the massive potential he displayed in Aerophone. Ones hopes there is a lot more to come and that Kelly proves as adept at pushing the boundaries of sound and vision as he is at blurring them.
∏More Continues until 22 April. www.greenonredgallery.ie