The Lonely Ones
2018
∞ minutes
(no set duration)
Instrumentation
Fixed Media / Installation
for multiple stereo playback devices
Notes
In the spring of 2018, the Spartanburg Art Museum (SAM) commissioned Peter to create a musical installation for the lonely ones, an exhibit of the work of photographer Gus Powell. Peter’s “The Lonely Ones” is an immersive, aleatoric, and open-ended piece built from audio samples of the artist's own description of his photography.
In an interview with SAM podcaster Mat Duncan, Gus Powell said that he was inspired by the late, great cartoonist William Steig and his classic book, The Lonely Ones (which pairs Steig’s line-drawn characters with simple one-liners of dialogue-to-self), and “wanted to do a cover album of that book.” This led to Powell’s own “lonely ones” which features quiet but evocative color photographs of interiors and landscapes, inhabited by people, animals, and inanimate characters paired with text.
For the installation, Peter built further on the idea of a "cover album," extracting and remixing excerpts from Powell’s interview, creating multiple audio tracks that reframe Powell’s own words. Set to loop in random order, the music was played through multiple channels throughout the museum. As patrons viewed the work, they were met with continuous sound, the tracks blending and fading out as they walked through the space.
Also available on Spotify and Apple Music.
Powell’s photographs capture in-between moments in both urban and rural settings, where city streets and landscapes alike are sparsely populated and the action being captured is often open-ended and undefined – a solitary man appears to bag something in the undergrowth of a dead tree, a pair of muddy tire tracks lead off into the fog, and a woman exits the subway near a tarp covered vacant lot. These single frame vignettes and quietly surreal stories are meaningfully enhanced by the presence of Powell’s texts. With his words as a guide, we see the overlooked magic in a circle of rainbow-colored lawn chairs strewn around a beach fire pit or an empty road sign pointing to a snowy nowhere. The careful ambiguity in Powell’s photographs opens up the broad opportunities for his textual associations and reconsiderations. Men on a beach boardwalk, a butterfly in flight, a typewriter in a bag – these mundane things are all the first lines of stories, and Powell is only too happy to use his spare words point us in one direction or another. His elegantly integrated phrases and pictures are rethinking how contemporary photographic narratives can be built, turning found oddities into catalysts for further wanderings of the mind.
Loring Knoblauch