TRANSIENCE: THE WORK OF DAVID MOLINA

A solo sound art and music exhibit
Where: Asterisk Gallery 3156 24th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
hours: open every wednesday through saturday 11am to 6pm, through Feb 28 2013.
cost: FREE!!
Check out my artist feature in the latest Asterisk Magazine music issue:
www.asterisksanfrancisco.com/v3i1/davidmolina.html

CURATORIAL STATEMENT by Dorothy Santos.
Transience provides a retrospective look at David Molina’s theatrical scores and music compositions as well as his collaborative works with Bay Area artists including Garrett La Fever, Mickey Tachibana, Cause Collective, Susie Valdez, Victor Cartagena, Violeta Luna, Roberto Varea, and Anna Geyer. The exhibition presents existing and new interactive works such as Memory Web, which showcased at SOMARTS and the 2012 San Francisco Fine Art Fair. For this particular exhibition, Molina will be presenting his latest interactive work, Rusting Souls, which entailed a deconstructing and reconstructing of the Cimbalom, an instrument originally from eastern Europe.

Also featured is “A Dividing Line: American Ashes”, a 14 channel speaker installation about immigration, the border, and the lives that cross it or are separated by it. Molina and Roberto Varea conducted interviews with immigrants who shared their personal accounts of crossing, migration, and assimilation. Found interviews of militiamen, politicians, and anti immigrant propaganda counterpoint the migrant stories.

Spanning Molina’s installation works to a comprehensive discography, Transience assembles a collection of intricately re-imagined instruments, such as Homage to Musee Mecanique: A Game Of Time, The Chimes of Seven Spells, The Broken Heart Sings, a plethora of parts pieced together to create a multifaceted and unique experience of sound.

Hearing has the capacity to command our being by forcing us to listen and understand the world. The imagination works in conjunction with sound allowing us to envision our environment or awaken a long obscured tale. The works in Transience seek to envelop the listener into narratives and a tactile experience of music. With no specific starting point other than the listener, the exhibition emerges as a study of contemporary music making and how stories can be told through beautifully and meticulously strung notes by the artist-musician’s hand. Transience is an examination of how music affects our understanding of personal histories and interactions as well as our perceptions of sound.