Quaker Harmonizer
Assembly
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Over the past summers we have traveled to various Quaker Meetinghouses around Pennsylvania making audio field recordings and photographs of the spaces. Many of the Meetinghouses are still in use, but we recorded them when they were empty and uninhabited.
Later, we condensed each
Meetinghouse recording from hour-long recordings to simple tones—the roomtones
of the empty space. Additionally, the
ambient color of each meetinghouse space we identified as a single color tone. We
separated these color tones into their component parts which will remix as the
CD is spinning. These visual and aural
tones have been re-imagined in the accompanying wall painting.
Quaker Harmonizer is a work to be
played as an instrument within a space.
Merion Friends Meetinghouse
Lehigh Valley Friends Meetinghouse
Sadsbury Friends Meetinghouse
Old Caln Meetinghouse
Race Street Friends Meetinghouse
QUAKER HARMONIZER
Pat Badt & Scott Sherk
Assembly Gallery
October 10th to 20th 2014
When members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) set out to build a place of
worship, there is no doctrine to guide them. Unlike the long histories of religious
architecture in other faiths, there are no mandates or precepts about the proper way to
construct a sacred space. When deciding how to build a house of meeting, Quakers are
left to interpret the general tenets of their religion: simplicity, equality, community and
peace. It is no wonder that such spaces attract the keen sensibilities of artists Pat Badt
and Scott Sherk.
“Quaker Harmonizer” is the latest of many collaborative projects by the two artists. For this
work, Badt and Sherk traveled to a number of Quaker meeting houses around their home
state of Pennsylvania. After taking sound recordings and photographs of the unoccupied
spaces, Badt and Sherk distilled their source materials into a singular auditory and
chromatic tone for each of the houses of worship. “Quaker Harmonizer” presents a
selection of these essences in the form of paintings and sound recordings. Considering the
reductive process by which they were made, the resulting sounds and images are
surprisingly varied. As with the work of German artistic duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose
Water Tower photographic series demonstrate the endless variation in these structures,
“Quaker Harmonizer” stems from a fascination with difference in repetition. However, Badt
and Sherk’s project is no dispassionate exercise in taxonomy. The artists’ attentiveness to
the unique qualities of each space is what gives the viewer such a sensual experience of
tonal variation.
Working with different media, both Badt (painting and bookmaking) and Sherk (sculpture
and sound) have vital independent practices. By joining their efforts for this project,
“Quaker Harmonizer” foregrounds issues inherent to the collaborative process: How do
you create work that allows distinct visual and aural elements full expression without
overwhelming or intruding upon on the other? How can two artists harmonize their
disparate voices to create third means of expression? How is collaboration its own form of
communion?
Though their practices are quite distinct, Badt and Sherk share a common artistic lineage;
both are in dialogue with the minimalist language of the 1960s and early 70s. Working in
this idiom, painters such as Agnes Martin and Frank Stella, and sculptors such as Robert
Morris and Donald Judd, used simple geometric shapes and volumes to bring the viewer
into relation with the objects themselves as an immediate and embodied experience. Yet
minimalism’s emphasis on primary structures left little room for personal expression. In
“Quaker Harmonizer,” Badt and Sherk transform the cold mathematical legacy of
minimalism to address a range of more intimate concerns, from the warmth of human
relations to the tranquility of an empty room of worship. This intimacy is as evident in the
final work as it is glimpsed in their process.
As a friend and fellow artist, I can imagine them now, inhabiting the space of the meeting
house. The project, almost an excuse for these quiet afternoon outings together. They take
in the simple geometry of the clapboard siding against the roofline. They listen to the
volumes of silence reverberating in the carefully crafted hall. There are no doctrines here.
Just simplicity, equality, community and peace.
David Baumflek, 2014
opening reception, October 10, 2014 6-8
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