This building has a voice. Or at least a sound: a deep, throbbing, juddering rumble, all captured by artist Trevor Mathison and played back into the space.
He recorded the sound of Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art – the blips and statics of its echoey rooms – then twisted and transformed them. They gurgle out at you in the opening gallery of this show, while in the middle space hefty speakers pump out the hiss and throb of archival Mathison recordings and a live microphone picks up the sound of New Cross Road and plays it in an adjacent corridor. It all becomes one big mixed composition, old works collaged with the sound of the building and the street rushing by.
It sounds great. Hectic, busy, discomforting, all clashing sirens and white noise. But it’s hard to grasp what it’s about or why it was made. Is it an audio portrait of the building? Is it tape loop experimentation for its own sake? The drawings and paintings here are pretty enough, but the archival material is just some cassettes and a photocopied article about Mathison. In German. There’s no information, no conceptual thread to grab on to, no context. It’s just a lot of sound, with none of the fury explained.
It works as a sound composition. It would work as a tape or digital recording, but it doesn’t quite come across as an exhibition. The building has a voice, but there’s not enough here to help you understand what it’s trying to say.
