Opening reception: Friday, September 9, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. Lecture by Joe Diebes, beginning at 5:30 p.m.

Song of Transformation includes two sculptural sound installations by composer and artist Joe Diebes. Conceived as companion pieces, Sound Field (2003), and Aviary (2004), speak to a confluence of nature and technology, which the artist views as neither progressive nor pernicious. "I'm imagining a division of reality into the fabricated world in which we live and some kind of natural environment that precedes it," says Diebes.

Sound Field was commissioned by MATA (Music at the Anthology) for its 2003 festival, and Aviary by the College Art Association for the 2004 exhibition Suspension: Sonic Absorption. They are displayed together for the first time at the Bell Gallery.

Each of the installations includes sculptural objects in combination with continually changing audio elements. Visually minimal, Aviary presents seven white birdcages suspended throughout a large white room. Digitally manipulated birdcalls emanate from the empty cages, each cage emitting a separate sound track. The viewer, walking through the gallery, hears different calls, in differing combination. Nature is transported indoors, modified by technology.  

Utilizing a similar set of elements, Sound Field presents a world that is literally and metaphorically darker. In contrast to bird songs, the audio in Sound Field is made up of sine tones and white noise in Morse code. Viewers enter a darkened room in which black silk sunflowers grow from a lawn of black Astroturf. Small beams of light hitting the faces of the sunflowers provide the only illumination, as sine tones and white noise call out from the flowers. Diebes describes the sound as an " aggregate sonic cloud through which something raw and primal has been reconstituted . . . "

Joe Diebes studied literature and philosophy at Yale University, graduating in 1995. His varied musical studies range from classes at the Juilliard School to private sessions with pioneering sound artist and composer La Monte Young. From 1996 to 2003, he was an artist member of, as well as the musical force behind, GAle GAtes et al., an art and performance company based in Brooklyn, NY—described by Peter Marks of the New York Times as "an adventurous troupe with one foot in the world of postmodern art and the other in downtown performance. Diebes's opera installation Strange Birds was performed in the U.S. in 2001 and had its U.K. premiere this year. He is currently working on a new opera, Hypatia, based on a libretto by Mac Wellman, as well as on a sound installation for the 2006 winter Olympics in Torino.

The extended series of photographs that Kerry Stuart Coppin has brought together under the title Materia Oscura/Dark Matter, dating from 1990 to 2005, portrays Africans and African descendents, and their environments—the architecture of their homes, the streets they inhabit, and the landscape that surrounds them. Through these images, Coppin asks us to consider the formation of a trans-Atlantic Black African identity, encompassing the Americas, the Carribean, and West Africa.

Coppin has photographed Black communities in the U.S., Senegal, Cuba, Barbados, Brazil, and most recently in Egypt. In the U.S. he photographed in Chicago and Miami, and also in rural Kansas, where he recognized a Black experience, "as significant in number, as diverse and complex as those in major cities." In Dakar and other urban areas of Senegal, he concentrated on the daily life of urban people--merchants selling newspapers, cigarettes, fish; children playing; sports fans in defiant celebration. He puts forth an alternative view of the Black African experience that contrasts with the images we most often associate with this region: those of tribal communities--bare-breasted women, people clothed in elaborately dyed and woven cloths or dancing with masked costumes--and of severe crisis from famine, draught, war, AIDS, or ethnic genocide.

Drawing a distinction between his photographs and those of straight documentarians, Coppin says he works in a "documentary style." He refers to his use of Photoshop, which allows him to alter images in order to clarify his point of view, perhaps removing figures that interfere with his subject or adding an object to improve the formal composition. He likes to point out that this is not unique to contemporary photography, that Walker Evans and W. Eugene Smith also altered images. He also presents us with handsome images. The strong sense of formal composition evidenced throughout Coppin's work--from street scenes to abstracted landscapes--is enhanced by exquisite print quality. Attesting to the fact, demonstrated by Walker Evans, that documentation and beauty are not mutually exclusive.

This exhibition provides a brief introduction to the work of Kerry Stuart Coppin, who joins the faculty of the Department of Visual Art, Brown University, this fall.   Coppins's extensive resume records more than 150 exhibitions, at venues including the Center for Documentary Study, Duke University; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Houston Center for Photography; California Museum of Photography, Riverside; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Ct.; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago. His photographs are held in the collections of the African-American Museum, Philadelphia; Asociacion Cultural Yoruba de Cuba, Havana; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the West African Research Center, Dakar, Senegal, among others.

Coppin received a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a MFA, studying with Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, at the Rhode Island School of Design.   Prior to coming to Brown, he taught at the University of Miami; Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas; Rochester Institute of Technology; and Columbia College, Chicago.