W. Mark Sutherland - Time Signatures

PARDON MY FRENCH

CUTUPS

RADICAL ARTIFICE

SCRATCH

Exhibition: August 28 - September 25, 2016
Opening Reception and Artist Talk: August 28 @ 2-4 pm

Signatures translated into the sing of the sign and sign of the sing by the passage of time.
 
Time Signatures is an exhibition of eight sound poems produced in a variety of time-based media. Each poem blurs the borders between the signature as a unique linguistic sign and as a musical tempo or key. The exhibition features battery-powered digital metronomes, altered vinyl recordings, wall-mounted CD players, and two videos.

The primary installation–performance-piece in this exhibition is Time Signatures for György Ligeti, based on the late composer Ligeti’s 1962 performance score Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes. Meta4 is the secondary installation–performance- piece in the Time Signatures exhibition. Meta4 consists of four separate wall-mounted CD players attached to four guitar amplifiers by four contact microphones. Viewers can activate each of the four wall-mounted CD players by pulling a cord attached to each CD player's on-off switch. The viewer is the DJ mashing Meta4 into a series of sound-poetry solos, duets, trios, and quartets.

Time Signatures also includes the metal masters used to manufacture Sutherland's 1998 LP Scratch, inspired by John Cage’s 4'33", Eugen Gomringer's “Silencio,” and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy's gramophone etchings. Pardon My French and Cutup (William S. Burroughs/Bryan Gysin) are altered vinyl records featured in this exhibition along with Radical Artifice--a synthetic sonotext based on the sequential reading of punctuation marks in pages one to three of Radical Artifice by Marjorie Perloff (The Chicago University Press, 1991).

Chorale and Static Poem are the video components of the Time Signatures exhibition. Chorale is an animated concrete videopoem using the words sing and sign; Static Poem is an electronic translation of Dadaist Man Ray’s poem-painting Lautgedicht.
 
What the critics say,
 
Sonotexts W. Mark Sutherland (CD, EMF, New York, USA, 2011)
 
"This fascinating selection of "sonotexts" by Toronto based artist W. Mark Sutherland, who acknowledges Bob Cobbing as his mentor, may well mark a critical development in the life of sound poetry."
Julian Cowley of The Wire (2012)
 
Code X W. Mark Sutherland (CD Rom, Coach House Books, 2002)
 
"readers" here become engagers, players, who make some interesting agential choices in the text. This kind of reader engagement in the text and uniquely in this case in the aurality of the text, gets met with the clear influence of avant-garde traditions; this point of convergence becomes a major feature of Canadian elit as a national literature."
Dani Spinsoa, Code X Experiment as Digital in Canadian Elit
NeMLA Symposium, Hartford, CT, USA (2016)

​W. Mark Sutherland (www.wmarksutherland.com) is a Canadian intermedia artist. His aesthetic practice is a hybrid that pivots on the creation of work blurring the borders between poetry, visual art, music and performance art. He frequently uses forms and/or generates content like a DJ by sampling, mashing and mixing the works of other artists, past and present. Recent activities include the group exhibition Cut With The Kitchen Knife… (2016) Spatiu Intact Gallery, Cluj, Rumania, a public performance at the Poesia En Voz Alta (2016) festival in Mexico City, a videopoetry screening at WRIT LARGE – A Festival of Text (2015), Oakland, California as well as poems published in the following international anthologies: the last Vispo  (Fantagraphics Press, Seattle, USA), Typewriter Art (Laurence King Press, London, England), The New Concrete (Hayward Publishing, London England) and The Art of Typewriting (Thames & Hudson, London, England).