11.30.07 – 12.22.07

Peter Speer, Doug Shaeffer, Phillip von Zweck, Anne Elizabeth Moore, & Carmen Price

If you were the last one on Earth, the Earth would feel like an island. There would be no human sound, except your sound, and that sound would probably scare you a little, make you feel a little vulnerable, because you’d feel like the silence was overbearing. It might feel hostile, like a greater force that was listening. It happens in movies sometimes. It happens in the Twilight Zone, it happens in boarding school nightmares: the idea of being the only person left on the world where everyone else has vanished without a trace of violence. The sense of uselessness would encompass you, and swallow you up. Ideas would be you only company, become your best friends and take on a proportion that was larger than life. It is quite possible that you would go wild, lose any connection with language, forget the distinction of subject and object.

New York sound artist Peter Speer, and Chicago native Doug Schaeffer come together in a presentation of their wares. Book covers become diaries in shorthand, while miniature diagrams implicate the source of sound. Both the novel and the noise are absent, however. The materials used in this show are removed from their intended purpose, implicated original sources just as they transcend them and growing into independent art objects that map out a particular recollection. These are maps, useless, cryptic, and obsessive; all that have been converted into notepads for shorthand.