James Richards

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi is pleased to announce James Richards’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition comprises two sound installations across both gallery spaces: Mouth Room, a new 8 channel work at Eden Eden (Bülowstr. 74) and Crumb Mahogany, one of the artist’s most major sound installations, presented at the main gallery (Schöneberger Ufer 61).

Crumb Mahogany was first shown at the Bergen Kunsthall in 2016 and toured onwards to the ICA London and then to Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover. The work involves a highly diverse pallet of sampled and digitally generated sound, moving quickly between emotive musical passages and sharper, more aggressive modes.

A key thread, in the work is a consideration of the human voice and its modes of transmission, be that bodily or technological. The bodily is present in the sounds of song, and sung melody, alongside guttural textures, such as human breath inhaling before song, the faint sound of lips, and the resonance of the mouth cavity itself, while the mechanical is present in the residues in electronic sound recording such as the stutter of hard disks, the hum of tape, or crackle of vinyl. These two forms shift and alternate, melodic and percussive motifs and field recordings emerge and then submerge from these mechanical and biological holding environments. Moving from periods of tension to periods of lightness and flow, the piece plays with a constantly shifting sonic foreground and background that moves around the listener.

Mouth Room (2017), a new production developed for the two large rooms at Eden Eden is a work that borrows its title from the 1976 video by British video artist Stuart Marshall. In Marshall's work we see a close-cropped shot of a mouth moving slowly to affect a series of field recordings. The work plays with speech patterning, vocal cavity resonation and the electronic fracturing of speech. Marshall’s work - a simple but charged expression of modes of embodiment and materiality, became a starting point for Mouth Room by James Richards that draws from the artist’s

ever growing archive of field recordings, stray midi signals and sampled electronics In this new audio work, the focus is on an edit that draws sonic extracts from cult horror shorts by JX Williams and John Carpenter.

Another central component of the work are a number of orchestral precision arrangements made in collaboration with percussionists Harry Greenaway and Ellen Smith. These live improvisations set the compositional backbone for Mouth Room, around which the appropriated material is embedded. Different from Crumb Mahogany, the work is constructed from hundreds of separate recordings edited in the gallery space over a period of a month, giving a sense of the piece being very much ‘live’.

Mouth Room breaks away from the usual circular arrangement of speakers that Richards has been working with in works such as Crumb Mahogany and Music for the gift - his work at the 57th Venice Biennial. Here, the composition is made to split between two adjoining rooms - separating out with different elements audible in the two ground floor galleries of Eden Eden - while at other times they synchronize, unifying the two spaces. In Mouth Room the emphasis weighs on the sound, both textural and percussive, with separate channels of audio synching up to produce cinematic spatial environments, where all streams of audio collectively render a space.