Eddie Ruscha’s new body of work, entitled Seeing Frequencies, develops the LA-based artist’s long-standing interest in the visual modalities of sound and music. The exhibition will be accompanied by an immersive LP of the same name, which is an exciting departure in his musical practice and charts an atmospheric and experimental course in multi-percussive sounds. The paintings themselves are inspired by the philosopher and scientist Margaret Mead’s ideas of ‘the listening post’, a source that collected and synthesized information from across all fields of data recovery, like a central computer or a proto internet network. Combining mystical philosophies with the cinematic vocabularies of earlier West Coast avant-gardes, from Oskar Fischinger to Jordan Belson, John Whitney to Scott Bartlett, Ruscha’s spirals, mandalas, and ovoid shapes take on new interpretations in a world riven by images without meaning. In addition to the LP, the exhibition will be accompanied by a new essay by Matthew Holman, which provides novel readings of Ruscha’s paintings alongside subjects ranging from Renaissance master Pietro Perugio’s treatment of perspective, David Hockney’s Californian light, and the physics of waves.
