Nick Hallett

Nick Hallett reimagines portraiture through sound sculptures that capture human presence without relying on facial imagery. The composer and artist’s first gallery solo show in New York presents multichannel audio works which comprise sonic portraits of four poets: Wayne Koestenbaum, Pamela Sneed, Kyle Dacuyan, and Penny Arcade. Accompanying the installation are four visualizations derived from spectrograms of each subject’s voice.

Hallett’s work is guided by the question “Can human likeness be conveyed by the voice alone?” To create each portrait, Hallett records the subject in a relaxed, informal setting, inviting them to bring poems and songs. He begins with vocal warm-up exercises, then records the subject reading, singing, and engaging in casual conversation. The entire session becomes source material for a multichannel audio composition, or a sonic object understood as a collage constructed from the voice.

On the gallery walls are four visual works that translate the voices into physical form. Created from spectrograms of the sound portraits, the works are rendered onto acoustic panels, connecting their visual presence to the material properties of sound. Each is a work in its own right as well as a physical and conceptual representation of its corresponding audio portrait. There is one visual work for each of the four subjects.

Hallett considers these sound portraits to be both original works of art and time-based documents of the voices, ideas, and practices of the poets he portrays.

The portraits plays on a loop during regular gallery hours. Each successive week of the exhibition, a new portrait is unveiled with its subject present, adding to the audio program.

Nick Hallett (b. 1974, USA) is a musician, artist, and organizer. His practice develops around the spaces in which voice comes into contact with image, movement, and language. His solo and collaborative works have been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, the New Museum, BAM Next Wave Festival, Performa/Town Hall and The Kitchen. He has received two New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards and a Creative Capital grant. As an “invaluable” (New Yorker) cultural producer, Hallett engages with archive as a tool to build community, exemplified by the the annual NYC concert of Terry Riley’s In C, ongoing since 2005, as Music Director for a decade-long revival of the Joshua Light Show, and as curator of live art at the NYC AIDS Memorial. This is his debut exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.