JORINDE VOIGT: Song of the Earth

On Thursday, March 2, David Nolan Gallery will host a musical performance with Claire Chase and Pauchi Sasaki in conjunction with a special installation of drawings by Jorinde Voigt. On view from February 23 through March 25, the installation contains new works from Voigt’s latest series, Song of the Earth. As part of this collaboration, Voigt prepared a series of reproductions of a vast 26-foot-long, multi-part drawing, The Shift (Song of the Earth) I-VIII (2016) which, in turn, were individually annotated and used by Chase as musical scores. Interpreting the imagery and colors within the work, Chase translates these visual cues as varying pitches and melodic shifts.

The art historian Fiona McGovern has written the following about Voigt’s new series: “What does it mean to be on earth? Jorinde Voigt’s new cycle of works Song of the Earth, in allusion to Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, devotes itself to this question in an all-encompassing way. [The works] represent an abstracted form of lived experience and theory and constitutes the basis for the ensuing musical interpretation. For Voigt, both drawings and musical transformation are systems of conceptualization that have major parallels due to their abstraction as well as their formal construction. Both may be comprehended as processes that translate reality.”

Works from the series Song of the Earth have previously been presented at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and Kunstraum Innsbruck in Austria. A survey of Voigt's recent work, entitled A New Kind of Joy, is concurrently on view at Kunsthalle Nürnberg. Works by the artist are represented in a number of major public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus, Zurich; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; and Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, among others. Voigt lives and works in Berlin.

Flautist Claire Chase, described as “the young star of the modern flute” by The New Yorker, is a soloist, collaborative artist, and activist for new music. Over the past decade she has given the world premieres of over 100 new works for flute, many of them tailor-made for her, and, in 2012, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) in 2001 and, in collaboration with her creative partner Joshua Rubin, serves as the organization’s Co-Artistic Director in addition to playing over fifty concerts a year as an ensemble member. She has performed throughout the US, Europe, Asia and the Americas, and recently began Density 2036, a 23-year project to commission a new body of repertory for the flute leading up to the 100th anniversary of Edgard Varèse's Density 21.5 (1936). She lives in Brooklyn.