Jules Gimbrone
I create fragile corporeal sound and sculptural ensembles that highlight the differentiations between modes of perceptual acquisition—specifically visual and sonic—within complex and precarious arrangements of subjects and objects. Combining sound and objects into immersive aural and haptic environments, I re-engineer sites of past and current performances with audio transduction equipment, producing installations that transform the sounds of performance into a physical and material experience.For me, the temporal and indeterminate properties of sound is more methodology than medium and can take on forms ranging from sculpture, recordings, performances, installations, and scores.
Using a variety of recording and amplifying technologies—in addition to materials such as glass, clay, ice, and the processes of decomposition—I investigate how sound travels through space, bodies, and language as a way of exploring hidden or sublimated gendered systems. Concerned with the tension between conceptual power systems and their inevitable demise, the container and the contained, the visual and the sonic, my work exposes multiple queerings of the performative and pre-formative body.
I arrange translucent, bisected, reflective, liquid, and entropic material into ensembles like a resonating stage or a duet between glass vessels. Each object is studded with transducers that convert audio recordings of the material into vibrations directed back into their sources. The transduction of sound in turn transduces the function of the surface material. Rather than demarcating the boundaries of autonomous objects, they indicate relationships that are pervious, manifold, and in flux. Visually and audibly affected by the sonic transfer, the ensembles become listening bodies that rattle, shatter, ripple, bloom, and evaporate. My process is like gardening. Probing surfaces like a topographer, I cultivate some resonances and maintain some visual definitions. Other elements are left to slowly rot or ripen. The resultant musical composition is thus a catalyst for material decomposition through which each ensemble performs itself anew. And as with the formation of subjectivity, natural processes and cultural techniques overlap in ways both harmonious and discordant. Overtones cause a shard of glass to dance skittishly on the salty surface of Thin Spread of a Specific Edge (2018) . The small piece of performing glass was once lodged deep in my leg when I five. It went undetected by X-ray machines until it rose to the skin one year later. Broken and preserved, sharp and harmless, of the body yet foreign to it, its solo act demonstrates both the physical intensity and fundamental permeability of corporeal parameters. In another piece shown here, False Binary Call and Response (2018), the pronunciations “Oh,” “Owe,” and “Ow” resonate from vessels flanking a two-way mirror i. While the twin images of the vessels, are redoubled, nested, and concealed, their sound waves pass inward and emanate outward, speaking interjections of indebtedness.
In my Collapse Score series, collapsing the score implies that the duration of a composition has imploded. Indeed, the only indication of time in these wall pieces comes from the gradual decomposition of organic material. In one score, blood, urine, and grapefruit peels color a swath of horse hair from a violin bow. The elements, also including colored pigment, are sandwiched between sheets of glass, representing the interplay of surfaces and opacities that is central to my musical philosophy. Like the Invisible Objects recording series in which I try to evoke a physical object through listening to the recording and understanding the recording methods being employed, Collapse Scores tries to evoke imagined music and sonic material contained within a seemingly static object. The performance may have already happened in the gesture of imprinted in the score or may have the potential to unravel in a future, imagined, space.
EDUCATION
2014 California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, M.F.A. Music Composition and Interdisciplinary Media
2012 Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY, M.F.A. Performance and Interactive Media Arts (1 year completed)
2004 Smith College, Northampton, MA, B.A. Sociology and Studio Art
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS AND PERFORMANCES
2018 Take Care, Gas Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Surface (Oh, Owe, Ow), Stellar Projects, New York, NY
Four Simultaneous Soloists, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY
Dysmorphias, Draw A Line, Another Echo – In Practice, SculptureCenter, Queens, NY
Peel, Part 1, Queering Space, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University, Alfred, NY
2017 Language Until It Doesn’t, The World Is Sound, The Rubin Museum, New York, NY
2016 Monomorphic Surfaces (or What I Listen For When I Listen In Men’s Bathrooms), LA, CA
Pressures, City Limits Gallery, Oakland, CA
Proximities, Material Art Fair, Mexico City, Mx
2015 Traps And Transmutations, The Social Register, Park View Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Trio, Gulp, Boris R., 2601-2603 Studios, Los Angeles, CA
There Is No There There, Threshing Floors, Cuchifritos Gallery, New York, NY
Rooms Junk And Other Forces, Théâtre De L’usine, Geneva, Switzerland,
2014 Ape Cave Stratum Feeding, Old Zoo Food, La><art, Griffith Park Old Zoo, Los Angeles, CA
Taking Up Space, Cover, Junk, Strike, Flax Fahrenheit, Los Angeles, CA
Spooky Action / Flesh Wedge, The Third Ear, Fellows Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
In My Absence, All Sound Is Queer, Bowerbird, Philadelphia, PA
Sick Building, A404, Calarts, Valencia, CA
Piss Pot, The New Century Players Ensemble, Calarts, Valencia, CA
Gloc Infinite Loop, Bomb Magazine Benefit, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, NY
2013 Outer Edges, Vox Populi, Aux Performance Space, Philadelphia, PA
This Body Is Not That Solid, Black & White Theater, Calarts, Valencia, CA
Sympathetic Release, Human Resources La, Los Angeles, CA
A Thin Wall Sympathetically Maintained, Human Resources La, Los Angeles, CA
Blubber Humm, Black & White Theater, Calarts, Valencia, CA
Diagonal Throws, Rod Hall Calarts, Valencia, CA
2012 Pastor Pasture, Emerging Artist Commission, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, NY
Wrest Album Release And Video Screening, Spectrum, Brooklyn, NY
Evening, 3ld Art & Technology Center, New York, NY
Round, Bodega Gallery, Judas In Breath, Curated By Jen Rosenblit, Philadelphia, Pa
2011 Of A Structure, Whitman Theater, Brooklyn, NY
Wrest, Sound Of Arts Festival, Queens, NY
Geo, Jen & Jules, Curated By Randy Magazine, Moma -‐ Ps1, Queens, NY
Crude Imitation, Socrates Sculpture Park, Brooklyn, NY
2010 Wrest, The Performance Project, University Settlement, New York, NY
2009 Aria Orion, Galapagos Art Space, Brooklyn, NY
Let The Sharp Stone Fly, Monkeytown, Brooklyn, NY
PRESENTING PANELIST
2018 “Invisible Objects” – Regenerative Feedback, ISSUE Project Room
2017 “Unnatural Acts Between Consenting Adults” – Legacies of Pauline Oliveros, Brooklyn College
2015 “Queer Sound”- AVANT: Psychoacoustics Session I, ALLGOLD, MoMA PS1
2012 “Using our Bodies : Performativity, Collaboration and Interactivity” The Symposium on Electroacoustic
Music Performance – Brooklyn College
PUBLICATIONS AS AUTHOR
2017 “A Room without Walls: Experimental Music and Queer Space”, Ear | Wave |Event – Issue Three,
Summer 2017, earwaveevent.org
2016 “The Privileging and Negation of Bodies of Sound”, Native Strategies, Music Issues #5
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2018 Tepper, Allie, “In Practice : Another Echo”, SculptureCenter, April 2018
2017 Lee, Risha, “Listening and Liberation : The Word is Sound”, Spiral Magazine, June 2017
2015 Halajian, Suzy, “On Getting It”, Bomb Magazine, March 2015
2014 Darling, Nikki, “This Body is Not That: Sonic Frontiers with Jules Gimbrone”, KCET ARTBOUND
Perel, Marissa, “Jules Gimbrone by Marissa Perel”, Bomb Magazine, January 2014
2012 Jen Rosenblit & Jules Gimbrone, “Interview”, ISSUE PROJECT ROOM Newsletter, May 2012
2011 Burns, A.K., “Jules Gimbrone & Geo Wyeth”, Randy Magazine, June 2011
2010 Domeneck, Ricardo, “Jules Gimbrone/ ARIA ORION”, Hilda Magazine, June 2010
PROJECTS CURATED
2016 Everybody! Come Stand on the Altar!, PSSST, Los Angeles, CA
2014 N {enter} S, Native Strategies, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA
2013 Fault Lines, PACK Projects, Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA
AWARDS AND HONORS
2018 In Practice – SculptureCenter, NY
Foundation for Contemporary Arts – Emergency Grant
2015 Foundation for Contemporary Arts – Emergency Grant
2013 Point Foundation Scholar Semifinalist – The Point Foundation, USA
Interdisciplinary Grant – California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA
Music School Grant – California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA
Diversity Grant – California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA
2012 Point Foundation Scholar Semifinalist – The Point Foundation, USA
Emerging Artist Commission– with Jen Rosenblit – ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn, NY
2010 DCA Regrant Recipient – Brooklyn Arts Council, Brooklyn, NY
2009 Special Projects Grant –with Elliot Montague – The Princess Grace Foundation, USA
2008 Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media Grant – Funding Exchange, USA