With Shadow and Sound Marlene Radice shows us how to see sounds, how to feel tones. From curb to twang the artist guides us through a synesthetic experience and provokes new interconnections between our different senses. While we hear softness in the dark and shrillness in the light, see lights accompanied by gloomy resonance and darkness surrounded by light-hearted progression, we seem to understand everything about the ups and downs of life and about how (much) beauty is found in the broken. Far from all rules, this piece shows us that we all can live this holistic and sensitive adventure of hear-seeing and feel-hearing if we just keep our senses wide open.
The concept behind my work ‘Shadow and Sound’ was to create an audio-visual performance piece that explores the nature of light and dark within music. The video uses multiple short and layered shots of improvised performances of myself playing clarinet in different lightings across different times of day. I wanted to create motifs of sound that use traditional ideas of ‘light’ or ‘bright’ sounds in bright lighting and contrast them with ‘dark’ sounds in dark lighting to show a visual idea of how these sounds might present. I used layers of footage and abrupt changes in shots to subvert these sound and colour associations, juxtaposing the dark colours with light sounds and vice versa. This shows the way these distinctions can be broken down and challenges what we as an audience define tone colour in music to mean within a visual context.
