Dots and Loops: Jen Chen-su Huang, Rita Maas, and Audra Wolowiec

In the post-war era of contemporary art, the musical score began to take on non-traditional roles in visual art, dance, sound art, poetry, and more. Conceptual and performance artists especially started to experiment with the formal structure of a musical score as a way of creating works that were more fluid and shifting, emphasizing process, interpretation, and iteration over a final, static product.

Dots and Loops brings together the work of multidisciplinary artists, Jen Chen-su Huang, Rita Maas, and Audra Wolowiec, who take up the musical score as a visual and conceptual framework to investigate questions around language, legibility, and perspective. Working site-specifically, the artists in Dots and Loops engage with themes relating to the natural world, presentness, and interpretation. They simultaneously impart the aural experience of being in a particular environment, while also exploring the ways in which that experience might be different for each person and how meaning constantly dissolves and reappears, taking on new, ever-changing forms depending on context and point of view. Through score, the artists interpret and relay sound through images, calling attention to those perspectives that often go unnoticed, opening up alternate ways of reading and listening.

Take, for example, the site-responsive drawings by Rita Maas from her series Call and Response. Working through silence, chance, and meditation, these drawings result from a deep-listening practice Maas started after a period of hearing loss that led to her heightened awareness of everyday sounds. Sitting in gardens, Maas attentively listens to the ambient birdsong while documenting what she hears from each ear with the corresponding hand. The result is a page of unmediated mark-making where auditory experience is relayed through pressure, shape, and location of the lines. All the drawings included in Dots and Loops were created at Wave Hill, and they serve as ephemera, documentation, or even archival materials—an attempt to convey an instantaneous moment of convergence between sound, image and embodied experience.

Referencing two films called Dots and Loops by the experimental animator Norman Mclaren, the title of this exhibition also implies an interconnection between the aural and the visual. In these films, Mclaren created a form of synthetic sound by drawing directly onto the soundtrack of the analog filmstrip. The relationship between sound and image production in both Mclaren’s films and the works presented in this exhibition is circular, looping, and symbiotic. As Maas’s hand moves to draw in the same moment she hears the birdsong, the scratching of her pencil on the paper makes its own noise, adding to the natural soundscape.

Audra Wolowiec’s project (waves) compares language to water due to its aqueous, ungraspable nature. This series started as a performance piece that took place aboard a passenger boat crossing the Hudson River. In this performance, an ensemble vocally performed an abstract sound score composed from interstitial chapters of Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves that focus on describing the coast rather than furthering narrative. Distilling the text to its formal structure and connective joints, only the prepositions and conjunctions from these textual interludes are used in Wolowiec’s score, celebrating the disfluency of language and the multiplicity of interpretation. The artist then cast certain words from this score in ice, and performers released the ice sculptures into the Hudson where they melted, further merging language and water. Dots and Loops presents new works from this series, including photos, printed scores, and concrete sculptures. Distilling the text to its formal structure and connective joints, only the prepositions and conjunctions from these interstitial chapters are used in Wolowiec’s score, inviting a celebration of the disfluency of language and the multiplicity of interpretation. Here, space and site are expressed through breath and rhythm. Wolowiec’s work takes on a meditative quality, asking audiences to be present and embodied in our relationships to silence, sound, and water.

Similarly, the textiles of Jen Chen-su Huang reimagine Colonial American weaving patterns and other gridded forms as musical notations that she can play on her keyboard. In one artwork, she even transforms an old photograph depicting Wave Hill’s conservatory in a state of disrepair before it was rebuilt in 1969. In the image, the dilapidated windows of the conservatory form a grid that, for Huang, becomes a musical score. She then reinterprets those sounds back into the visual language of notes, patterns, and weavings. Through this practice, Huang unfurls the slippery nature of language, pointing to the generative possibility that emerges from illegibility. Like in Wolowiec’s work, perspective, possibility, and process are emphasized over meaning-making.