July 27 – October 19, 2008 The Cleve Carney Gallery
Mónica Herrera’s interactive sound installation, Strings turns the Cleve Carney Gallery into a temporary, walk-in instrument. Strings from various found instruments will be suspended from the ceilings, walls, and floor of the gallery making a visual and aural composition. The new installation envelopes the space in sound-producing sculptures, allowing audience members to create music as they walk through and explore the space.
Participants entering the installation become both producers and listeners as they walk through, pluck, play, and listen in the space. By enlarging (and exposing) the typically enclosed and inaccessible interior of an instrument to human-scale, the artwork places the public inside the instrument where the sound is being produced. Strings also embraces creative participation and encourages the audience-turned-performers to play the strings together to make melodies. Herrera has arranged and tuned the strings in such a manner that harmonies can be produced more easily when played simultaneously.
Mónica Herrera earned a B.F.A. at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (Mexico City) and an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2008). She has exhibited at the ARCO Contemporary Art Fair in Madrid, Spain, at the Smart Museum, and in the 44/46 Public Art Exhibition in Chicago. Her constant travels between Chicago and her hometown, Mexico City, have informed her increasingly poetic sensibility of cultural borders and the efficiency and originality of the materials she uses in her sculptures and drawings.
Image: Monica Herrera, Strings (proposal sketch),, 2007, colored pencil on paper, 10 × 10 inches