Although born and raised in Caracas, it’s in New York City where artist Wolfgang Gil accelerated his career as an artist exploring the sculptural qualities of sound. In fact, Gil employs sound as a malleable material with curves, edges, and changing geometries—indeed, a medium that can be stretched in all dimensions. The artist creates sound-emitting sculptures and room installations that invite the audience to contemplate listening as a phenomenon, and offers unique opportunities for the discovery of both the external space and our internal perception processes along the way. In a unique way, Gil fuses the art object and setting into an enveloping spatial experience, and unsurprisingly, the work is only completed when the listener actively engages in a personal dialogue with both the sound and space. Last year, the Venezuelan-born creative relocated halfway across the planet to Tokamachi, a provincial town in Japan‘s mountainous Niigata prefecture.
Currently on view at Contrast, the exhibition space of Tokyo-based digital creative agency In Focus, is Gil’s solo show Sonic Geometries. On display are sound-emitting sculptures which were showcased at his previous show at the Newark Museum of Art in 2022, but also two new works and a reconstructed sound installation. When creating sound for a sculpture, Gil explores the object’s resonant qualities by playing different sounds through it and observing the relationship between what he sees and hears. This lengthy process leads to the creation of a unique set of sounds that is specific to the object itself, defining the object’s language. Mind you, in the preparation process, the artist meticulously installed a mockup of the exhibition in his Japanese home, including the actual artwork, walls, wiring, and technology. After the show, the very same walls will be repurposed for museum that Gil is building in his new hometown (open through Mar 31). © superfuture.com
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Just to be clear – superfuture® is a design blog and not a political commentator. No surprise there. The scope of our content has always been global and borderless, however that can often mean covering projects in countries where we will not agree with the politics or actions of those countries. In a world that’s as screwed up as ever right now, the focus of our support is to those designers, architects and other creatives who aim to make the world a more liveable one – as opposed to people that try their hardest to destroy it. So if a project hits our desk and we like it based on its design credentials, we may choose to publish regardless of its location or creators nationality. superfuture® has always been inclusive and hopes for all current wars, aggression, violence, hate and extremism to end.
