See Hear! is an exhibition created by artists Stephen Piccolo and Gak Soto who investigate the relationship between visual and acoustic art. Their works build upon Dadaist and Futurist movements, which created challenging new work that was reinvestigated and expanded upon by mid-20th century artists, whose work often included the creation of visual images, performances, and sound. Continuing technological advances and a strong inclination of contemporary artists to explore multi-disciplinary works have kept “sound art” at the forefront of the contemporary art scene. See Hear! is a further exploration of how “sound art” challenges our personal constructs of what “art” is – and the kind of art a visitor to an art museum might expect to experience. Throughout the exhibition’s duration, visitors will experience an interactive setting that offers a creative and fun way to consider the relationship between sight and sound.
During the period of April 7-15, 2006, the Turchin Center welcomes internationally acclaimed artists Stephen Piccolo and Gak Sato to participate in a Visiting Artists Residency. The residency offers sound as an expanded context for experiencing the visual arts. The focus of the residency and the sound experimentations is not centered on the creation of a final “product” in a traditional sense; rather it will hold as its goal the generation of questions, interactions, and future research.
Stephen Piccolo was born in 1954 in New Hampshire. He attended school in New York at Bard College and New York University. After studies in New York (Roswell Rudd, Charlie Haden) he began his professional career in the early 1970s playing standup bass in jazz groups. Toward the end of the Seventies he founded, together with John and Evan Lurie, Arto Lindsay and Tony Fier, the group The Lounge Lizards. Over a span of about five years, the group released several recordings and performed for a devoted fan base at international festivals and well-known venues worldwide. Piccolo currently lives and works in Milan, Italy.
Gak Sato was born in Tokyo in 1969. Creator of the Tokyo-based band Diet Music, in 1999 he became Artistic Director of Temposphere, the contemporary music label of Right Tempo Records in Milan, Italy. Sato has participated on various remix projects with the Easy Tempo label, which reissues and remixes Italian soundtracks of the 60s and 70s. Since 2002 he has held the position of professor of Techniques of Sound in Art at the Accademia Carrara fine arts academy of Bergamo, Italy. He is currently participating in a A Year from Cage, and will soon release his third album, Informed Consent. He currently lives and works in Milan, Italy.
Piccolo and Sato have collaborated with many visual artists on performances, installations and videos. Since the 1970s, Piccolo was occasionally active on what was called the “performance art scene” in New York, with the project Domestic Exile. Today, the research on urban sounds and drifting has led to works made by Piccolo and Sato that border on the notion of installation, though the musical side is always present. In the field of design, Piccolo has worked on sounds for objects found in the home, for companies like Alessi, the Italian design factory. Piccolo and Sato have also composed the music for the ADI film on the history of the Compasso d’Oro prize. Recent works include a video with Adrian Paci, an installation with Ivo Bonacorsi, sounds for design companies Zanotta and Alias. Piccolo and Sato are on the faculty for 2005-06 (their fourth year) at Accademia Carrara of Bergamo, Italy, teaching a sound design course.
See Hear!, and its extended programming, are supported by a generous gift from Dr. Peter and Joni Webb Petschauer.
