List Projects: Sergei Tcherepnin
July 15–October 19, 2014
MIT List Visual Arts Center
20 Ames St., Building E15
Cambridge, MA 02139
The MIT List Visual Arts Center presents the first solo museum exhibition by Sergei Tcherepnin and the debut of his work Subharmonic Lick Thicket, commissioned by the List as part of its List Projects series.
Tcherepnin composes sound works that are actualized through sculptural forms, objects that exist simultaneously as speakers and instruments. He explores visitors’ capacities to affect and be affected by sound through their bodies as much as their auditory systems. Using materials that conduct and mediate sound, his environments overlay moments of discord and dissonance with emergent sonic unities.
In Subharmonic Lick Thicket, Tcherepnin’s sound recordings transform a raised gallery floor into a vibrating speaker, with sounds and tones transmitted both through the air and directly from floor to body. Fabric elements and metal forms derived from the shape of the tongue and mouth emerge from the floor and walls. Visitors listen to the room’s accumulating and dissipating, multiple and serial sonic intensities with the specificities of their bodies and positions in space—activating the mouth-and tongue-forms, laying upon or walking on and off the fabric. These physical sound systems at times invite, at times rebuff, interaction, with each sonic state a point of departure for other trajectories of listening.
List Projects: Sergei Tcherepnin is curated by List Assistant Curator Alise Upitis.
About the artist
Sergei Tcherepnin was born in Boston, MA in 1981, and currently lives and works in New York. His performances and exhibitions include Roulette, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pavilion of Georgia at the 55th Venice Biennale; Murray Guy, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Karma International, Zurich; Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the 30th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil. He participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and is a recipient of 2014 Villa Romana Fellowship in Florence, Italy.
Support for the List Center is generously provided by the Council for the Arts at MIT; the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT; the Massachusetts Cultural Council; TOKY; the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee; and the Friends of the List. Special thanks to Murray Guy, New York, and Karma International, Zurich.
