'Desert Silence, Transposed to the Cacophony of New York' by Randy Kennedy
2017
The artist Doug Wheeler is known for creating simple-seeming but titanically tough to achieve environments in which light and space are experienced in a manner usually reserved for the realms of mystical vision or psychedelic drugs: as things in themselves. “Voids,” as he once said, “have matter.”
But he has also long dreamed of work that incorporates another sense, sound — or the near absence of it — for the same purpose, based on solitary desert sojourns in Northern Arizona, where he was raised, and elsewhere in the West. He tells one story about how it feels to experience such profound and “elating” silence in the middle of the Sonoran Desert — the existential opposite of New York City, where his latest work, “PSAD Synthetic Desert III,” opens on Friday and runs through Aug. 2 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
“I watched a great horned owl sitting on a saguaro cactus,” Mr. Wheeler, 77, an amateur pilot, said last week at the museum. “And when it took off, it was just amazing. There was no sound, at least nothing I can describe as sound, but just a kind of almost imperceptible percussiveness in the air.”
Read more at The New York Times.
