Flux: water and sound

Flux used the fluid and mutable properties of water and sound to create a daily, live interaction in the gallery.  Water flowed through the bamboo poles attached to a pump in the tower.  It circulated through the space producing an active visual and aural experience.  

Composer Vid Smooke, with three additional musicians, created a spontaneous performance of water sounds using bamboo tubes and large copper bowls to “play” the piece.

Water as an underlying substance and an essential element serves as a governing metaphor for understanding the universe in terms of flux and interconnectedness.  Yet, it’s the playful and unpredictable quality of moving water that motivated this installation -- the sound of dripping water as it strikes the surface of still water, sounds made by flowing water bumping up against an obstruction, or the plunking, hissing, swooshing and layering of multiple sounds echoing through the space, re-circulated to begin the process again.

An installation at VisArts in Rockville, MD
water, pump, wooden tower, bamboo tubes, pool
2012

Review:
By Mark Jenkins, Washington Post

Katherine Kavanaugh's 2012 installation, "Flux: Water and Sound" at VisArts, featured a wooden structure with bamboo tubes and a water pump, creating a sensory experience with a pool. Washington Post critic Mark Jenkins described the installation as a "water play" instrument that combined sound, light, and movement.

Outside many Japanese temples and shrines, there's a basin that contains water for purification; often water spills into the receptacle via a bamboo tube. Entering VisArts at Rockville's Gibbs Street gallery is not much like approaching a Japanese temple. But Katherine Kavanaugh's installation there, "Flux: Water and Sound," manages to evoke the experience. The room is dominated by a piece that arrays nine bamboo tubes at various angles. Each drips water, at a different pace and volume, into a plastic trough.

The gallery is a standard art/industrial white box, altogether lacking a sylvan vibe. Rather than install rocks or shrubs to make the space more bucolic, the Baltimore artist conjures a Zen-style garden just with water's motion and sound. "Moving water has a will of its own — uncontrollable, dynamic," writes Kavanaugh. The liquid in this piece, which streams from an large, illuminated tank, is fairly well controlled. But the rippling water sparks small, unexpected variations in sound and light. These suggest the experiments in chance devised by noted American Zen enthusiast, John Cage.

That's apt, since Cage was foremost a composer, and "Flux" is as much music as visual art. The show includes a series of bamboo staves and hammered-copper bowls, labeled "Instruments," and the opening was marked by a performance by composer David Smooke and other musicians. A piece involving a copper cone and a semicircle of blue spatters on the wall is titled "Call and Response," a musical term.

Smooke and his cohorts reportedly played the installation itself, but such intervention is not necessary to make “Flux” musical. Water and gravity, with a little help from bamboo tubes, do that on their own. Visually, the mix of bamboo and plastic doesn’t make for a cohesive whole. But with eyes closed, the call and response of dribbling water is transporting.