Dream House: Seven+Eight Years of Sound and Light reopens for new season

M E L A
M E L A F o u n d a t i o n I n c.
2 7 5 C h u r c h S t r e e t
N e w Y o r k N. Y. 1 0 0 1 3
2 1 2 - 9 2 5 - 8 2 7 0 Fax: (212) 226-7802
www.melafoundation.org email: mail@melafoundation.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 1, 2002

La Monte Young Marian Zazeela
Sound and Light Environment
Extended Exhibition at MELA Foundation
275 Church Street, 3rd Floor

Saturday, September 21, 2002 continuing through June 21, 2003
Thursdays and Saturdays from 2:00 PM to Midnight
Contribution $4.00. Information 212-925-8270

Dream House: Seven+Eight Years of Sound and Light,
a collaborative Sound and Light Environment by
composer La Monte Young and visual artist Marian Zazeela,
is presented in an extended exhibition at MELA Foundation,
275 Church Street, 3rd Floor. The environment is open
Thursdays and Saturdays from 2:00 PM to Midnight.
Suggested contribution is $4.00. The long-term exhibition
opened in Fall 1993 and will continue for this season through June 21, 2003.

Young and Zazeela characterize the Sound and Light
Environment as "a time installation measured by a
setting of continuous frequencies in sound and light."
In the light environment Marian Zazeela presents
four works, two environmental: Imagic Light and
Magenta Day, Magenta Night, in installations specifically
designed for the site; and two sculptural: a neon work,
Dream House Variation I, and a wall sculpture,
Ruine Window 1992 from her series, Still Light.
In the environment Imagic Light, Zazeela projects
pairs of colored lights on mobile forms to create
seemingly three-dimensional colored shadows in a
luminous field.

In the concurrent sound environment, La Monte Young
presents The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When
Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes
in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279
and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division
Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The
Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The
Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which
Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms
in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below
and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112,
63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119,
a periodic composite sound waveform environment
created from sine wave components generated digitally
in real time on a custom-designed Rayna interval synthesizer.

Both artists are presenting works utilizing concepts
of structural symmetry. Zazeela's mobile forms are
arrayed in symmetrical patterns with lights placed in
precisely symmetrical positions creating symmetrical
colored shadows; the wall-mounted light sculpture
and the neon are both symmetrical forms. Young's
sound environment is composed of frequencies tuned
to the harmonic series between 288 and 224, utilizing
numbers with factors of only 9, or those primes or
octave transpositions of smaller primes that fall within
this range. The interval 288/256 reduces to a 9/8 interval
as does the interval 252/224. Thirty-two frequencies
satisfy the above definition, of which seventeen fall within
the range of the upper, and fourteen fall within the range
of the lower of these two symmetrical 9/8 intervals.
Young has arranged these thirty-one frequencies in a
unique constellation, symmetrical above and below
the thirty-second frequency, the center harmonic 254
(the prime 127 x 2).

Young has stated that: "This is my newest and most
radical work; the Rayna synthesizer has made it possible
to realize intervals which are derived from such high
primes that, not only is it unlikely that anyone has ever
worked with these intervals before, it is also highly
unlikely that anyone has ever heard them or perhaps
even imagined the feelings they create."

In 1966, Young and Zazeela pioneered the concept
of the continuous sound and light environment, and
have since presented large-scale sound and light
productions in museums and galleries worldwide for
continuous periods from one week to five years,
including installations in the Metropolitan Museum,
New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; documenta 5,
Kassel; Kunstverein, Cologne. Under a long-term
commission from the Dia Art Foundation (1979-85),
Zazeela and Young collaborated in a six-year continuous
Dream House presentation set in a six-story building
on Harrison Street in New York City, featuring multiple
interrelated sound and light environments, exhibitions,
performances, research and listening facilities, and archives.
Now in its tenth year, MELA Foundation's Dream House:
Seven+Eight Years of Sound and Light, is Young and Zazeela's longest
installation to date.

In Minimalism:Origins (Indiana University Press, 1993),
Edward Strickland has written of their collaborative
environments: "Intense light [is] aimed through [colored]
filters at quasicalligraphic aluminum shapes hung by
ultrafine filaments. The effect is a unique and extraordinary
transvaluation of perception: the mobiles seem to hover
unanchored, while the shadows they cast in various hues
attain an apparent solidity against the light-dissolved
walls equal to their literally palpable but apparently
disembodied sources. Like Young's music, to which it
serves as an almost uncanny complement, Zazeela's work
is predicated upon the extended duration necessary
to experience the nuances which are its essence."

Their one-year sound and light environment collaboration,
The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime
Time from 112 to 144 with 119 / Time Light Symmetry
(Dia Art Foundation, 22nd Street, NYC 1989), was
described by Village Voice critic Kyle Gann as "some
of the strangest and most forward-looking art New York
has to offer." A 1990 Donguy Gallery, Paris, exhibition
was purchased by the French Cultural Ministry National
Foundation of Contemporary Art for permanent installation
in a French museum. Die Tageszeitung wrote about
their 1992 DAAD Ruine der K�nste, Berlin environment:
"A longer stay in the Dream House is necessary to
experience the full effect. The mind is calmed by the
environment in a meditative way, and subtle sound and
light effects that are veiled at first sight then come to the
fore."

Of the current environment, Seven+Eight Years of Sound
and Light, Sandy McCroskey has written in 1/1 that
"Zazeela's light sculptures have invariably, teasingly
refused to surrender their entire secret to photographic
reproduction, so much do they depend on the retinal
impact of activated photons in real time and so much
do they exploit, in ways analogous to Young's techniques,
the creation of visual combination tones and an accumulation of
after-images."