Artist Talk: Gamut, Heather Gordon

Join us the following the opening reception of Heather Gordon’s series Gamut Saturday, September 16, 2017 at 1PM for a talk with the artist, questions, roundtable and more.

For more information about Gordon or to contact, visit her website, http://heathergordon.transition-project.com/. For more information about her current exhibition at SPECTRE Arts, see below or visit http://www.spectrearts.org/project/gamut-heather-gordon/

Gamut

Heather Gordon

Opening Reception:Friday, September 15, 2017. 6pm-9pm
Exhibition Dates: Friday, September 15, 2017 – Friday, October, 6, 2017

Gamut : the entire range of notes reachable by an instrument or voice

Gamut, Heather Gordon

SPECTRE Arts, Durham, NC

The works in Gamut are physical objects representing silent intervals that form the structure of our sound ocean. They are the result of a wide range of scientific research, intuitive knowledge, philosophical meanderings, and improvisation. I have given myself free reign to consider the nature of our sonic world over the course of seven months and accept as valid any object that chose to emerge. I have been testing the range of the instrument of my body and mind.

Prior work had me focused on dissecting the cognitive experience of iterations and the processes that create them. I was fumbling about looking for an underlying rule for our relationship to the experience of time. Now I’ve side-stepped into the territory of interval, those spaces in between that allow us to see the iterative moments. I’m looking at the size of the silence in relation to the sound. The experience of our sound space seems determined by dimension and steps, ratios and integers, resonance and entrainment.

This work has been a journey into sound shapes. As I consider myself a map maker primarily, these works logically use the language of mathematics to describe my personal and individual experience of sound. I am wonder-struck at the way some resonating combinations can open up new spaces that feel physical in the sense they are biological, but remain temporary. Each one of these objects represents a marker, the moment of the interval. Each map is evidence of learning something, discarding something, shifting, reprioritizing, regulating, and predicting. These visual sound maps are observances forcing the collapse of infinite possibility into a singular crystalline experience with a shape.

A coincidence of the purest ray serene
– Erv Wilson

Heather Gordon was born in Landstuhl, Germany in 1967. She is the only child of Ron Gordon, a military officer with a specialty in quality control and logistics, and Elizabeth Gordon, a financial analyst who earned her degree in French. Before the age of 30, she had called over a dozen locations home. She now lives and works in Durham, NC.

Although making art at an early age, Heather initially went to school for pharmaceutical research, eventually earning her BFA in visual arts from the University of Florida in 1995. After traveling for the next two years and earning an income through fashion modeling, she landed in Ogden, UT where she worked as a data transcriber for the Internal Revenue Service. Within two years she was enrolled at New Mexico State University earning her MFA. Upon graduation, Heather moved to Asheville, NC and established an art supply store called True Blue Art Supply & Services which she co-owned and operated for ten years. During this time, she established a freelance web design business which she ran for the next 17 years. In 2004, she sold her art supply business and soon later, moved to Durham where she married and had a child, Henry.

In 2014, Heather was awarded the North Carolina Artist Fellowship and became a full-time working artist. She has exhibited her work at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the Ackland Art Museum, 21C Museum Hotel Durham, CAM Raleigh, Waterworks Art Center, and ArtPrize 7 as the 2015 Pitch Night Durham recipient. Her upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at CAM Raleigh opening in October 2017 titled And Then the Sun Swallowed Me, and the North Carolina Museum of Art in 2018 as part of the You Are Here group exhibition focused on immersive installations.

Gamut will be on view at SPECTRE Arts from Friday, September 15, 2017 – Friday, October, 6, 2017. For more information or to schedule a visit outside of Third Friday, please email us at info@spectrearts.org.