Please join us to mark the opening of Unstable contacts, a new exhibition by Charlotte Parallel.

In her new installation, Unstable contacts, Koputai-based artist Charlotte Parallel presents an assemblage of home grown crystals arranged on a circular table. Like a hot wire table top game, the circular crystal arrangement is interlaced with sensors, contact microphones and switches, providing a responsive and surprising scenario in which audiences can create playful and unpredictable connections.

The title of this work draws upon Salome Voegelin’s 2019 essay, What does she Sound Like?, in which the artist and sonic theorist comments: “sound is always an unstable contact”. In this text, Voegelin teases out a geography of sound describing its potential as a material which offers listeners the means to engage and be engaged by manifold worlds. This conceptual potential of sound, to open us to new worlds and novel experiences, informs the origins of Parallel’s crystalline creation wherein our mobile bodies initiate a set of relations.

Unstable contacts features a text by Robyn Maree Pickens.

Opens: Wednesday 13 July, 5.30pm with refreshments provided by Liberty Brewing Company and performance by Ducklingmonster and Charlotte Parallel.
Hours: 12 – 4pm, Tuesday – Saturday
Closes: Saturday 13 August

Biography
Charlotte Parallel is an artist based in Koputai Port Chalmers. Working across sculpture, sound installation, collaboration and performance, Charlotte’s explorations of transduction, sonic materiality and interaction have been exhibited throughout Aotearoa New Zealand since 2003, and internationally since 2010. In 2016 she completed a Master of Fine Arts at Dunedin School of Art, and since this time has been exhibiting consistently to further her research into sound as a means of directing attention to the active forces of place.

Accompanying text by Robyn Maree Pickens read it here