Ensemble is the title of a new multimedia installation by Los Angeles-based, sound and performance artist Chris Kallmyer, on view May 19-Sept. 15 in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Preston Morton Gallery, 1130 State St.
The show centers on a sculptural instrument created specifically for the exhibit and comprised of raw timber and handmade bells that functions as a communal bell-ringing instrument, or carillon.
The instrument, activated by a group of individuals, employs a method of making music by non-musicians that blends collective listening with lively communal rituals and meditation practice.
Ensemble includes a selection of musical scores developed by the artist, related drawings, and a video projection documenting the inaugural staging of the instrument. The exhibit serves as an oasis for contemplation and exploration.
Accompanied by a series of sound and meditation workshops, the showing functions as a production and rehearsal space — part laboratory, part sanctuary — to be staged throughout its duration.
The exhibit serves as an active studio for Kallmyer to further explore the post-Fluxus poetics of everyday objects, what happens when audience turns performer, and what the visitor seeks from the experience of listening.
Ensemble rises from a series of projects by Kallmyer that explores site-based, shared music-making with public audiences.
In a month-long project titled A Paradise Choir (2016) at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the artist engaged thousands of volunteer visitor-enactors into an impromptu choir that explored the aural architecture of the newly opened Snøhetta-designed expansion.
Through a series of actions, impromptu concerts, and guided tours, amateur choirs and zealous visitors donned robes to yell, sing and move through the spaces of the museum.
In 2015, Kallmyer presented Commonfield Clay at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, creating what he termed “a future folk music” through regional materials and mutually authored music.
The project’s earthenware bells were made, in collaboration with ceramicist Dan Barnett, out of refined clay from the banks of the Mississippi River, alluding to the traditional brick architecture of St. Louis.
Informing this series is another earlier project, Everyone in a place (2010/2011), that Kallmyer produced with the L.A.-based art collective Machine Project, with whom he created more than 100 projects between 2009 and 2018.
Presented at the UCLA Hammer Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the project was staged through the participation of hundreds of museum visitors, who, wearing bells issued to them, created an ambulatory soundwork that permeated the spaces of each institution.
Kallmyer was born in Washington, D.C. He completed his MFA at CalArts in 2009, where he studied with improviser Vinny Golia, trumpet player Wadada Leo Smith, north-Indian musician Aashish Khan, and sound artist Sara Roberts.
Kallmyer is inspired by the international, interdisciplinary Fluxus movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and is committed to the notion of active listening.
In a 2017 interview with Catherine Womack in the LA Weekly, Kallmyer said: “I’m interested in how the context around music changes its meaning or changes how we value it.”
Implicit in his multi-faceted work is a sense of experimentation and audience participation, which has led him to commissions, not only by major art museums, but also music institutions, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony.
In related programming:
Ensemble Free Day: 1-4 p.m. Sunday, May 19. Free admission, art activities in Family Resource Center, pop-up events, and refreshments. Kallmyer will stage a performance with special guest artists, musicians and activists, 1-2 p.m.
1st Thursdays: Thursdays, June 6, Aug. 1, Sept. 5. Special guests perform, speak, and engage visitors within and around Ensemble.
For updates on coming events, visit www.sbma.net/events.
— Katrina Carl for Santa Barbara Museum of Art.