ARTISTS

Gabriela Wileman

www.gabrielanoel.online

Conversation from 2016 (2018)

Acrylic on canvas
18” x 23”

Nocturne in C# (2018)

Acrylic on canvas
18” x 23”

Guitar Distortions (2018)

Acrylic on canvas
18” x 23”

Spaceball: the American Radio Sessions (2019)

Acrylic on canvas
6ft x 4 ft

Quilt Painting (2019)

Found fabrics
4ft x 4ft

Artist Statement

My current work is a series of “sound pieces” in visual form. My work is heavily process based, but cannot be forced. They are natural and need-based occurrences. I am often highly affected by negative and positive aspects of sound and energy, sometimes even confusing myself not knowing if I am feeling my own emotions or acting out on behalf of someone/something else. These paintings are expressive of those frustrations, ease of mind, and self-love. Small drawings sometimes make their way into these paintings, often intuition and memory based. They work with the paintings to mend conflicting points.

Music has always made its way into being a starting point/subconscious way of outputting something visual. This has grown into music and art living simultaneously in my art practice to try and spark the interest of provoking that sort of synesthesia onto my audience that I experience, onto the viewer. This has led me to make music and being active with varying sounds and how they affect my vision and body. In doing this, I have formed a process that I believe can evoke the feelings of synesthesia onto the viewer. Last year I came across the digital sound spectrograph – “[a visual] instrument for analyzing sound into its frequency components.” Immediately this foreign machine resonated with the word synesthesia, and I realized the universal ability for humans to experience sound like a moving, or still, image. In exploring the dimensions of the spectrograph I began to ask – What would happen if you created sound from an image by putting this image through a spectrogram? What about the in-betweens that a pixel can’t replicate – emotions, soft moments rather than the harsh edges that the graph depicts to us? And what if you visualized meaningful in-betweens by use of the color wheel rather than looking at it with just the colors the graph provides you with What is it like to be a piece of music? This resulted in me painting the opposite of what a spectrograph can show you and may want to show a subjective emotional graph of a piece of music, thus creating its own 8 counts or 32 counts (depending on the size) snippet of sound.

We as humans have adapted to new perspective just by way of technological advances in 3d spaces through VR, Google, Apple and other every day advancing technologies, so in many ways warped perspective is currently becoming embedded in us and constantly being skewed and adjusted. In a way, this experience is subjective to the viewer and contributive to ways of seeing. Eventually, I would like to explore the use of directional speakers within my works so that within only a few feet you can only hear one paintings sound. This will force the viewer to be one with the piece rather than taking a step back to ask questions at that moment. Anything goes in terms of outside sounds and outer disruptions such as sirens, conversations and phone blips which then become intertwined into space thus becoming part of the viewer’s experience, making it an individual and one-time experience.