Sound Waves

On view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, CA, www.mcasd.org is the exhibition, "Sound Waves: The art of sampling," a group show of artists for whom music and sound play an integral role in their visual art making process. More than just music and
sound, the subtitle of sampling is important here because most of these
artists work with the notion of dj samples, mixing, recycling, and borrowing and relate them to ideas of seeing, form, and aesthetics, rather than straightforward music references. Artists I was expecting to see included Christian Marclay, Dave Muller and Steven Vitellio, who are most frequently represented in this area of contemporary art, as well as the French artist, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot whose large installation piece of the inflatable pools with resonating dishes, a piece which I had seen several years ago at Barbara Gladstone and enjoyed. But there were several artists I was not famililar with whose work was particularly interesting- a fantastic 16mm film of inked notes by the LA based artist Steven Roden, a weird boite -en valise-type piece (although it's actually a music case), by Helen Cohen, of a teenagers black lit room with rock posters, bed and furniture, and "Sonic Fabric," by Alyce Santoro, which resembles a boat sail and is made from recycled, prerecorded audio tapes and thread.
Also of note were the works by Dario Robleto, whose meticulously crafted and composed work is always a layered composition of recycled and recontextulized imagery and materials.