Sound is likely not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about visual art, but this new exhibition is challenging you to think outside of the box.
Kresge Arts in Detroit is holding its first-ever online art show, featuring the 2023 cohort of Artist Fellows and Gilda Award recipients in visual and literary arts. The online show features a mix of mediums including painting, ceramics, poetry, and more, all tied together with audio elements.
The exhibition theme is Flash Your Lights, inspired by 1970s Detroit radio DJ The Electrifying Mojo. Each night on-air, he asked listeners to imagine futures of peace and revolution united by sound and to collectively “flash their lights” to demonstrate they were listening in solidarity.
Kristen Gallerneaux, a 2019 Kresge Artist Fellow, curated this year’s exhibition and developed the theme. The local artist and sonic researcher is currently the curator of communication and information technology at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn and the editor-in-chief of Digital Curation.
“I tend to dwell a lot in worlds of sound history and media history and I’m very interested in Detroit music history, which got me to remembering The Electrifying Mojo, who has always kind of been a big hero of mine,” she says.
Looking through the work of the 2023 Fellows, Gallerneaux noticed a recurring theme of solidarity and community, much like The Electrifying Mojo, so she challenged the visual and literary artists to submit new or re-imagined pieces examining how sound surfaces in their art practice.
Along with monetary awards, part of being a Kresge Fellow includes access to professional development programs, and this was one project where artists were able to learn new ways to present their work. Gallerneaux says she held open hours for artists to discuss with her unique directions they could take their pieces for the exhibit.
“When I talk about sound, I’m thinking about it both literally and somewhat metaphorically, so for say a painter, there might be a sort of element in their work or a theme that can be teased out around the ideas of listening or silence or resonances,” Gallerneaux says. “We also invited artists to submit a variety of sound options to kind of amplify work that already existed. So say you had a painting, would that painting theoretically have a soundtrack? We allowed people to submit original compositions and found sound or sometimes it was even just references to memories of sound. There’s one artist in particular who had a lot of memories of sound from the community in which she lived, so we're able to stitch together some sound to create the soundtrack for her ceramics work.”
With her own interest in sound art and presenting historical content in digital spaces, Gallerneaux says this exhibit was “incredibly rewarding” to curate. She feels that the format complements the work nicely, not overdoing it with too much noise and offering moments of silence for contemplation of the art.
“It does not replicate a white cube gallery space. It’s more like individual artist pages that people can kind of scroll through and there’s text woven through,” the curator describes. “The web designer who worked on this did a really beautiful job of creating a really nicely immersive way to navigate this work. It has a side-scrolling mechanism that works really nicely and there are options to turn the sound on [or off]. There’s a lot of interdisciplinary work.”
Gallerneaux adds, “For me, what I really want to bring to the table is to broaden people’s idea of what sound in everyday practices and in artistic practices can be, that can mean literal sound, but it can also reference things like reverberation, sonic memories, even quiet as its own sort of form of silence, willful or implied. Also, just connecting people to this really broad pool of talent that we have here in metro Detroit and maybe exploring artists’ work through this additive lens and also honoring the legacy of The Electrifying Mojo… The exhibit is not about him, but it’s sort of expanding legacies of creative communities of listening that we have in the city.”
Flash Your Lights will be available to view online at kresgeartsindetroit.org for free from April 8-June 14. After June 14, only a shortened, modified version of the exhibition will be available.
