Staci DumoskiChapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery is hosting the exhibition, “Energy Fields: Vibrations of The Pacific,” an immersive exploration of the intersection between art, science and the invisible forces that shape our world.
Open until Jan. 19, 2025, this exhibition invites visitors to engage with a variety of multimedia works that explore how energy—from gravitational waves and seismic activity to the vibrations of sound and light—interacts with their daily lives.
Co-presented with Fulcrum Arts as part of Getty’s 2024 PST Art regional event and featuring the work of artists from around the world, “Energy Fields” showcases installations, sculptures and multimedia displays that are connected through their association with the Pacific region, described as “a zone of entanglement where these energetic forces resonate amidst the world’s most seismically active continental plates.” Each piece delves into the idea of energy as a dynamic and invisible force that influences not just nature, but human experience and perception.
Photo by Sophia MacArthur.
The Fusion of Art and Science
“There is a plethora of vibrational energies that elude human experience, but we can represent and comprehend them in ways that imagine embodiment and make them relational to us,” said Marcus Herse, director of the Guggenheim Gallery.
The creative approaches on display in “Energy Fields” go beyond mere measurement, he said, demonstrating the ways we interrogate, represent and convey measurements and data sets.
“It is here that science’s link to the arts and to the practices of the artist-researcher become vital. Visual, linguistic, kinetic and sonic representations stand in lieu of the actual phenomena; objects, models, metaphors and poetic interpretations map the extrasensory onto our actual senses.”
Herse worked closely with curators Robert Takahashi Novak, executive and artistic director at Fulcrum Arts, and Lawrence English, Australian composer and artist, along with Fiona Shen, director of Chapman’s Escalette Permanent Art Collection. The team spent more than four years assembling the exhibition, which includes two pieces from the Escalette Collection, “WIND, Off-Shore Flow” and “WIND, On-Shore Flow” by artist Virginia Katz.
“Art can open us to different ways of knowing,” Shen said. “Everything on display engages with the scientific observation that what we perceive of the world—what we can see, hear, smell—is just a vanishingly thin sliver of what’s there. Our human sensory apparatus is limited by our anatomy, but artists can help us see infrasonic vibrations—sound waves that are too low in frequency for humans to hear. We hope that the fusion of art and science on display helps us imagine what we are missing.”
Central to the exhibition is David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s “Telepathy” (2008), a single-occupancy anechoic chamber—a sensory deprivation experience that allows visitors to contemplate their bodies’ relationship to sound and vibration. Due to its size, “Telepathy”, along with several other large-scale pieces, are on display in the Packing Plant at Chapman University, a short walk from the main exhibition space in Guggenheim Gallery.
Other works in the exhibition include:
- “ear(th)” (2004), a recreation of a singular, large-scale sculptural work by the late Los Angeles artist Steve Roden, offering an opportunity for visitors to recognize the energetic nature of seismic activities in Southern California through the use of a custom-built sounding system that transposes these largely inaudible vibrations into a fluid, almost musical transposition.
- Malena Szlam’s film “ALTIPLANO” (2018) creates visual rhythms against a soundscape generated from infrasound (below human hearing) recordings of volcanoes, geysers and Chilean blue whales.
- Alba Triana’s sound sculpture “Music on a Bound String No. 2” (2015) operates at the nexus of light and sound waves. Using sound, the artist vibrates a single string, which in turn reflects a shifting array of colors determined by the frequency of the vibration.
Programs and Performances Across the Region
In conjunction with the exhibit, a series of performances and panel discussions will be held at Chapman and throughout the Los Angeles area. See the full schedule of events.
On Oct. 4-5, a special installation of “Wild Energy” by Annea Lockwood and Bob Bielecki will be held at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden in conjunction with the exhibition. This sound installation provides visitors “access to the often inaudible vibrations and energies in the world around us.”
In addition, an eight-episode radio program, “Fundamental Resonance,” will explore new approaches to acoustic, mechanical and electromagnetic vibrations. Weekly episodes that started Sept. 15 will be broadcast online at Lookout FM and on KFQM-LP 101.5 FM Pacific Palisades, and a podcast is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
“Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific” is among more than 70 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide. Dozens of cultural, scientific and community organizations are participating, with exhibitions on subjects ranging from ancient cosmologies to Indigenous sci-fi, and from environmental justice to artificial intelligence.
For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, visit pst.art.
Admission to “Energy Fields” is free, and the gallery is open to the public Monday through Friday from noon until 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m.
For more information, visit the Guggenheim Gallery website.
