“With each breath I send sound and receive sound”

 

– Pauline Oliveiros, Deep Listening; A Composer’s Sound Practice (2005)

 

Somehow, when you woke up this morning, you were the same person that you were yesterday and you spoke the same language. Well, as far as you can remember. You went downstairs and said hello to your neighbors. They replied in a language that was similar to yours, though perhaps not exactly the same. You begin to think that maybe the language you spoke yesterday was not quite the same as the language you speak today. Perhaps it is the same amount of not the same as the language of your neighbors. You wonder about the nature of this difference.

 

Day by day, when you speak the words of your language, they change. They change as you do– they go to new places, they transform their shape and adapt to new situations. They circulate in an ocean of other voices. When you speak, you echo the many voices that have shaped your own. Where your words travel in the voices of the people who echo you, you travel also. This has been happening all over for a very long time. It is what makes our languages as similar as they are. It is how you and I met once. It is how you met these objects, long ago.

 

The works in these rooms are speaking to you. Parts of their language may be familiar to you and other parts may be unfamiliar. They navigate the sonic ocean as we do, echoing voices both human and nonhuman. They persist in time, marking the moments as they pass and wondering if they are the same as they were yesterday or even just a moment ago. They speak through the texture of this change. As you regard these works, you are also listening to this texture. You can hear it now: the shifting air, your changing body. Listen! It is your mind passing now from that to this, from senseless to sensible, from formless to solid, and now (!) yet again, to some new world just born.

 

– Nate Flagg, New York City, March 2022

 

Nate Flagg (b. 1989; New York, NY) is an artist and educator living and working in New York City. He received his MFA in 2016 in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT) and his BA in Anthropology in 2011 from Reed College (Portland, OR). Recent exhibitions and performances include: So Close, Yet So Far, Printed Matter/Swiss Institute (New York, NY), C.H.A.D., Ashes/Ashes (New York, NY), The Language Invention Workshop, Foxy Production (New York, NY), and MANIFOLD, BronxArtSpace (Bronx, NY). This is his first solo exhibition outside the United States.

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