Jim Hodges: colorsound

Pulling poetry out of the humble, Jim Hodges (b. 1957) transforms ordinary materials such as paper napkins, light bulbs, and silk flowers, into objects and installations of delicate and dazzling beauty. Most recently he has added sound and music to his artistic palette. As this spring's Edward E. Elson artist-in-residence, Hodges collaborated with over 100 students from Lawrence High School and Phillips Academy to create the "soundtrack" for colorsound: a visual and musical installation.

Included in this exhibition is a selection of recent works that lay the groundwork for this new installation. Subway Music Box, 2000 represents the artist's first experiment with music. This multi-projection video installation documents 24 musicians whom the artist encountered while traveling on the New York City subway. Arranging the found musicians and music into a single symphony of movement and sound, Hodges exposes the beauty that exists in unexpected places.

Jim Hodges, Picturing That Day (detail), 2002, collage in two parts, courtesy of CRG Gallery, New York

Building on Subway Music Box, Hodges then created a series of drawings that further explore the relationship between sound and vision. The Addison's installation is a visual and audible realization of a collaged sheet music drawing created in 2001. To create this particular drawing, Hodges went through hundreds of pieces of sheet music in search of instances where a song's lyrics mentioned color. He then cut out all of the color references and corresponding notes from their original compositions and spliced them together to create a diptych or duet.

As part of his residency, Hodges returned to this drawing which served as the "score" for both the sound and wall mural for this exhibition. Using the drawing as a guide, Hodges assigned each student a color and corresponding note and asked them to "sing" that color. He then wove together the recorded notes allowing the students' individual voices to guide the melody. Hodges also used the drawing to create the site specific wall mural. Here the drawing's colors are visually translated into 147 vibrant vertical painted stripes that flow down the hallway and wrap into the gallery in which one experiences the encompassing union of color and sound.