Janek Schaefer, 'Collecting Connections', SOLO SHOW
Gallery 1 and 2 The Agency Gallery, London, March/April 2013.

Press Release

The Agency is pleased to present a solo exhibition by award winning sound artist Janek Schaefer in Gallery 1 and 2. A version of his seminal sonic installation 'Extended Play' [Triptych for the child survivors of war and conflict] will be presented in Gallery 2. In Gallery 1 a number of Schaefer's recent and new sound pieces, collages and inter-media sculptures can be seen in a curated context. Schaefer's central concerns are sound and its environment. He utilises hybrid analogue and digital techniques to manipulate location recordings, modified vinyl and foundsound to create evocative and involving installations. Schaefer's sonic works are responsive and reactive within urban environments. Schaefer's works have demonstrated an acute sensibility to the sonic aspects of utilitarian architecture, such as abandoned supermarkets ('Asleep at The Wheel', 2010, International festival, Milton Keynes), roofs on iconic public buildings ('Rapture' is a site-specific choreography performed on the undulating roof-scapes of the Frank Gehry designed Fisher Center, New York, 2008) or simply the empty room ('Vacant Space', 2006, with Chris Watson and David Tinapple at the Bluecoat gallery and touring).

Schaefer's practice shows influences of the European strategies of Peter Weibel's Contextual Art ('Kontextkunst', 1993) and Nicholas Bourriaud ('Relational Aesthetics', 2002). In Britain Sonic art has been addressed largely as an extension of musical composition although Schaefer's work can be read as a sonic mapping of contextual events and surroundings, including the wider social aspects of his practice. His works take simple everyday narratives as a starting point, for example a family connection as in 'Love Song' (2003/2013), an exploration of all the female protagonists of one family brought together by the sound of their voices. Seven voices of female members of one family from the age of 7 to 64 were recorded and overlap in the subsequent piece, which is transmitted to radio headphones suspended from a cluster of helium filled balloons. The audience has to catch and hold onto the headphones to experience the composition. The piece combines a personal narrative, an archival sonic record of a family, an ephemeral sculpture and an incidental performance element, each of which in turn alters the way the space surrounding the work is experienced. Schaefer's foundsound collages extend beyond the simple field recording, for example when working with analogue radio in his piece for multiple radios 'Phoenix and Phaedra holding patterns' (2009). At all times combining knowing literal references to contemporary events laced with wit and pathos Schaefer infuses each of his contextual pieces with a nod to Hannah Arendt's 'Human Condition' (1958). It is the underlying awareness of the fragility of the self in relation to socio-political needs which are the foundation of some his more thought-provoking interactive works......