Contemplative cacophony
Kris Anderson attacks all senses in her new display
by Amelia Ishmael (buzz@boulderweekly.com)

My boyfriend works in an experimental genre of music called "Noise." When the neighbors knock on our front door, I try to explain that he does not use traditional instruments such as guitars and drums. They cock their heads to the side and squint, asking if he could just turn it down or, even better, off.

Noise music? For him it's a layered orchestration of disruptive sound elements programmed digitally. It is what abstract art is to the realist, the antithesis of classical music in modern times. It is discordant and awkward. It can be ambient or penetrating. High-pitched, droned and piercing, Noise dives into the complexity of sound of contemporary times in ways that contrast with traditional classical music.

So when I heard that Visual Noise was the title of an exhibition at the University of Colorado, I was excited that someone had decided to embark visually on this contradiction of terms, and I looked forward to the volume being turned up on a little-explored tendency in visual arts. It is a joy to describe visual arts through audio terms and vice-versa. Terms that are used in one context seem to enrich concepts in the other, building a sensorial texture through language. Artists such as Kandinsky, David Hockney, Vladimir Nabokov, Aphex Twin and Tool's Justin Chancellor have all been inspired by the amalgamation of senses known as synesthesia.

To gain access to this group of visual noisicians, M.A. Candidate and Gallery Director Kris Anderson placed a call to artists nation-wide asking them to interpret the phrase "visual noise." He stressed an original concept regarding the installation of this group exhibition that would display works "salon-style" on one wall (a West European 18th-century style of hanging paintings side by side from floor to ceiling) and in the Modernist, linear, eye-level style on the alternate wall. Wherever the works on the Modernly displayed walls were plotted, empty white spaces emerged on the salon wall. These two walls in Visual Noise intend to disrupt and enliven the act of viewing artwork by altering the traditional method of display.

However, this bold presentation method seems to overpower the exhibition. The three brightly hued, large-scale works on the Modernly displayed wall muffle the display across from the salon wall that depicts the works of more than 40 emerging artists. The large, gaping spaces dispersed at eye level create their own statement through the negative space that becomes surprisingly intriguing. The sort of randomness captured between the vacant and occupied places on this salon-styled wall emphasize a sort of randomness that begins to suggest the essence of Noise. But the formality of the relationship between the two walls is in the end too simple and self-defining.

Within the works on view throughout this show, some artists depict noise quite literally. Maryann Worrell's "Babies, White" and "Babies, Black" displays dozens of infant heads wailing in low relief from their panel base high up on the gallery wall in rectangular grids. "Extreme Emotion" by Cecilia Lueza uses large cutout vinyl forms to depict the passionate throes of an individual, with colorful waves used to symbolize the breadth of the passion.

Other artists use foundational drawing elements to establish a sense of sound through line, color or form. Melissa Straiger's "Purple" and Mel Prest's "Your Time is Going to Come" use overlapping, rhythmic, multicolored lines in works that appear as homages to the children's game Pick-up Sticks. Kat Hutter's "Hell's Kitchen" shows spray-bottles, cell-phones and flame-like paintbrushes dancing across an oddly shaped quadrilateral canvas in a dizzying display of direction and color.

The complexity achieved through the overlapping of layers of "visual sounds" on display is by-and-by the most successful approach to accomplishing Noise. This obfuscation of forms creates an abstract sense of bewilderment on the artworks' surfaces that celebrates an ambiguity that overcomes the representational in yearning for visual art that is more experimental in tone. On this note, it is the works by M.A. Papanek-Miller and Elizabeth Atzberger that steal the show through their tendency to split ways from the lackadaisical qualities of other pieces.

Within M.A. Papanek-Miller's "Run IV," viewers are likely to find a groundhog, a weight bench, some birds, a fish, xylophone mallets and a futuristic toy gun. The images converge with varying transparency in a random collection of illustrations that have been painted on burlap.

Elizabeth Atzberger's mixed media canvas work, "Untitled," features bright pigment that soups atop the surface, engulfing an eclectic collection of rubber banding (from hair-ties to car parts). Individual colors push against one another creating organic masses of form. The swamping of color and texture accomplished through this sheer volume of paint challenges spatial boundaries through material alone. Elements of the work protrude from the edges of the canvas, almost as if forcibly absorbing the surrounding wall into itself. This challenge of space and line represented by Atzberger accomplishes an experience for the viewer that goes beyond the self-imposed limitations of the other works on display and seems to hit at the center of the overwhelmingly sensorial experience that Kris Anderson worked towards.