Rebecca Lennon is a London based artist that blends together different forms of media like video, sculpture and sound to create pieces of heavy symbolic meaning and aesthetic . Her work takes the form of video and sound, to create multichannel audio visual pieces in galleries, she is extremely flexible across the field of contemporary art.
One of Rebecca Lennon most common compositional tools is the voice. She explores how rhythm, timbre and texture of a voice can shape an art piece and express its themes and concepts. Communication is an important focus in Lennon’s work, she investigates the role of the voice in communication and expose psychological pathologies that are hidden in the structure of the way we communicate.
Liquid i – Is a multichannel sound and video exhibition piece that took place in a primary school in Nottingham. In the gallery a massive screen was positioned in one of the back walls of the space, in the screen a video art piece was played. The video displayed several images and short videos of different symbolic elements, that where placed in an ambiguous narrative. The videos showed images that had a connotation to liquid: mosquitos drinking blood, a fish spitting water and some performers mangling water in their mouths. Sound mirror the images, emulating the rhythms of the mosquitos or the texture of water flowing. All the sounds where created using the voice and then being edited to create complex rhythms. Spoken poetry was also a part of the soundtrack, hinting the themes of the video, with symbolic words and phrases. The correlation of audio and sound in Liquid i refers a lot to the theories of Michel Chion, added value and sincresis are currently happening across the exhibition, making the audience get deeper into the world created in that space. Place and space are carefully chosen in Lennon’s work and always in someway the space takes a place inside the narrative and themes of the piece. For example this piece was exhibited first in a primary school and then in an old abandoned church, everything except an art gallery. This could represent some of the concepts in the video, for example a fish out of the water to an art piece outside of an art gallery.
Its interesting to see audio-visual techniques used to build up a gallery piece because it helps consolidate all the senses in a single space. In the future I want to attempt designing my own sound gallery and inspired from Liquid i, I think I will have to think about a visual aspect in my gallery, and how it connects to my sonic intention.