THE REELING OF DISBELIEF
Ivy Lee
23 April – 1 June 2024
Curator Patricia Bondesson Kavanagh
In On the Heavens, Aristotle described the theory of musica universalis. A metaphysical concept inherited from the Pythagoreans positing that the celestial spheres, from barren moon to atomic sun, even the microbial paradise of Earth, all produce a hum. That ours is a Universe inundated by vibration whose all-encompassing resonance is tuned to the orbiting bodies of planets and stars. Aristotle interrogated this––if the cosmos sings, why can we not hear it? Ought our eardrums not split or our bones set aquiver? The Pythagoreans had a simple albeit erroneous answer: that a being born into an eternally vibrating cosmos would by a lack of comparison not be able to distinguish celestial tone from silence. It would all ring the same, and appear as absence.
It is a recurrent yet melancholy sentiment that cuts and croons through time like a metal wire: how the limits of our sensory apparatus also limit our ability to relate to the natural, or rather unnatural, world. And that by nurturing a particularly anthropocentric diction our species has become deaf to all dialects beyond it, barring ourselves from being able to metabolize a greater planetary empathy. In the brackish water of this incomprehension, belief systems foster and fester, from the religious to scientific, ideological, and esoteric, all of which more often than not place the body of a besouled human at their core. Meanwhile, historical inventions were made to hook and reel what remained non-bodied, with technology measuring and taxonomizing the most abstract of phenomena; algorithms conceived and data entered––all the better to hear you with, to see you with, and to eat you with.
In her second solo show at Gallery Gudmundsdottir, Ivy Lee investigates this dissonance by unweaving the narrative tapestries that govern how we perceive the world. Unearthing from the air the unarticulated expressions of our planet that in human language have been reduced to concepts like weather or meteorological conditions. Through the eye of this needle, Reeling of Disbelief spins upon a spindle new threads for being with the world, looking beyond contrivances toward the conceptual resonance that moves living and non-living matter alike. Questioning how by acknowledging the ubiquity of vibrations––what Clarice Lispector named the last substratum of reality’s realm––we might be able to harmonize the discord that pervades human and non-human divides.
This conceptual synchronicity can also be found in the field of psychology, where attunement refers to the kinesthetic and emotional sensing of another’s rhythm by metaphorically being in their skin and creating a two-person experience of unbroken connectedness and resonant response. In the video work Reeling of Disbelief, Ivy Lee expands on this by tuning into Oaxacan foothills in Mexico billowing with wildfire smoke, a windswept salt mine in Zapotitlán, and the grey marshlands of a Brandenburg swamp. The artist enters these acoustic environments not as an interpreter but as a channel for synergetic attunement, drawing on mimetic expressions of vulnerability and play in atonal currents of call and response. Somewhere in between organism and organ, it is a delirious conference and confrontation that harks the Latin origin of the word conversation, rooted in a compound of ‘con-’ (meaning ‘together’) and versare (meaning ‘to turn’), literally turning together.
Consequently, the sculptures in the exhibition act as ‘conversation pieces’, each symbolic of efforts to make meaning of the meteorological, climatological, and cosmological. Notably in Uncertain Principle, where the soundscape of each film location is captured by spectrograms, i.e. visual representations of signal frequencies over time, commonly used for audio processing, telecommunications, seismology, and medical imaging, presented alongside the photo series The silence, rang and rang. Notations generated from data of wind velocity, humidity, cloud coverage, air pressure, and temperature are drawn on by hand, revealing disparate representations of simultaneous events. Acknowledging the difficulty of reading reality from our default mode of subjective human experience, it also lols at the phenomenological art world solution so pervasive at the moment of Making the Intangible Tangible™.
Named after the mythological Graeco-Roman part bird part woman personification of stormwinds, Harpyie extracts the heartstrings of a thermograph. Originally designed for measuring temperature it also incorporated harplike bundles of human hair to collect humidity. This abject within object and ghost inside machine can be seen as a totemic genus loci of the show, as well as a comment on the intimate commitment our species has made to technological progression, placing not only our ideas but also our physicality within industrial complexes.
Similarly, the sculpture Disbeliever condenses its form from a Bellani bell pyranometer that through heat transfer would have been used to measure solar radiation. Made from mouth-blown glass it here harnesses another ancient relationship, that between atmosphere and mind, considering that half of the oxygen we breathe sustains neural activity. Though long forgotten, it is a mist that tides our synaptic pathways, present since our species began to distill a sense of self from what we now perpetrate and perpetuate as a ‘Nature’. Still decisively scientific in appearance, it is anachronistically steeped in stone––a weight representative of the slowness of our Earth in comparison to our breathless accelerationism.
Together in a maelstrom, the artworks of Reeling of Disbelief seek to answer a question not dissimilar from the one posed by Aristotles. How is it that we exist in a world ringing with vibration, yet reduce this music to mere background noise? The answer is not far removed from what the Pythagoreans observed: it is a case of habit and numbness, wherein the art of listening has been frayed and lost. The works of Ivy Lee seek to thread it back together.
Patricia Bondesson Kavanagh
@dogvampire