Nasher Sculpture Center Announces Sightings: Luke Fowler

DALLAS, Texas (March 22, 2018)—The Nasher Sculpture Center announces Sightings: Luke Fowler on view May 12 through August 19, 2018. The exhibition will feature a newly commissioned sound piece, the first sound sculpture to be presented at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Sightings: Luke Fowler is the result of a partnership between the Nasher Sculpture Center and Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland, two institutions with unique outdoor settings for art—one a contemporary garden in a dynamic urban setting and the other a lush garden at an ancient castle in a bucolic rural setting. The two art spaces have jointly commissioned Scottish artist, filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler to create a sound sculpture for each location. For this commission, Fowler draws on practices of focused listening and architectural acoustics to create a multi- channel sound installation.

Using everyday objects and acoustic environments unique to each site, Fowler will create compositions that subtly examine the material history of the two sites and their acoustic qualities. The work premiered at Lismore in August 2017, presented in one of the medieval defensive towers surrounding the garden. Fowler will next travel to Dallas to take recordings of objects and architecture in the museum and its garden, use the recordings to create a new sonic composition, and install the new sound composition in a resonant part of the Nasher Garden.

“It’s a thrill to be able to present this work by Luke Fowler—the first sound sculpture ever to be exhibited at the Nasher Sculpture Center,” says Director Jeremy Strick. “Luke’s sensitive and intuitive approach to gathering sound and making it manifest in the space of the museum will add dimension to the experience of the physical sculptures and their environs, enriching the understanding of these works of art, the architecture, and the garden itself.”

The exhibition is part of the Nasher Sculpture Center’s Sightings series of smaller-scale exhibitions and installations that highlight new work of emerging or established artists.

About Luke Fowler

Luke Fowler (b. 1978, Glasgow) is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. His work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary filmmaking, and has often been compared to the British Free Cinema of the 1950s. Working with archival footage, photography and sound, Fowler’s filmic montages create portraits of intriguing, counter cultural figures, including Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing and English composer Cornelius Cardew. Recent solo exhibitions include Outside The Sound, Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge; The Presence of History in the Music of Today, Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Computers and Cooperative Music-Making, Whitechapel, London (with Mark Fell); Common Sense, La Casa Encendida, Madrid;