The Lincoln Park Conservatory has since 2001 incorporated artist-designed installations into rooms of the greenhouse, and among the more effective have been the ones purely of sound.
“Was It for This,” a sound collage by Stephen Lapthisophon, is the most recent of these audio installations in the Conservatory’s Fern Room and it’s probably the most complex in construction though it doesn’t seem so, thanks to the relaxed way it addresses visitors about urban and natural environments.
Layers of sound come at the listener from a speaker in each corner of the room, fed by two compact discs. The multilayered sound criss-crosses the room, so something that is clearly audible in one corner may be perceived as an echo when standing in a different corner.
Lapthisophon’s collage includes three readers presenting fragments of text, including poetry by Wallace Stevens and William Wordsworth, prose by Friedrich Nietzsche and Stephane Mallarme and other texts on botany and the philosophy of science. Instructional audio cassettes have been excerpted on such subjects as bird calls. Also part of the creation are seven computer-generated voices accompanied by manmade and natural sound effects, as well as a bit of a Dionne Warwick recording.
The collage is about some of the ways people have attempted to categorize and preserve Nature. But it doesn’t unfold in a linear way. It has no dramatic crests. It doesn’t even assert a shape or strong pattern.
Lapthisophon’s intent was to transmit sound events as freely and easily as the airborne movement of spores. Some might stick to visitors who simply move through the Fern Room, others might be consciously collected by listeners who remain during the entire 70-minute cycle. Either way, one does not have to grasp the additive nature of the piece, and it’s futile to wait for a single sound event that ties all the rest together.
Here, then, is a piece of public art that does its best not to intrude upon either its setting or the hearer’s consciousness. It’s enough, the artist says, for a word or thought or birdcall to lodge within passersby and make them more aware of the normal play of everyday occurrences. The piece is meant to insinuate and sensitize.
At 2391 N. Stockton Drive, through Sept. 30. 312-742-7736.
Karl Momen
Karl Momen, who has a retrospective of paintings at the Swedish American Museum Center, is a former architect who gradually moved into painting and sculpture. His earliest works on view, from the 1960s, are hard-edged and representational but strive toward a quiet atmosphere of fantasy akin to that of Magic Realism.
Thereafter, his work became geometrically abstract, and the forms of the canvases on view combined with their often hot color preserve a sense of fantasy more lighthearted than the pieces with a surreal tinge. Momen’s grounding in representation, however, frequently led him back toward elements suggesting architecture and the urban scene, so several of the abstractions convey sights and sensations from city life without literally depicting them.
In the 1990s, the artist began a group of paintings based on the operas of Richard Wagner and several classic plays, chiefly by William Shakespeare. Most have the canvas sectioned into a number of wide vertical bands into which have been inserted representational symbols, such as (in the case of “Romeo and Juliet”) a balcony, mask, cross, sword, bell and vial of poison.
The “Romeo” piece shows Momen playing with one of the bands, turning it into a three-dimensional architectural member that supports Juliet’s balcony near the top of the picture and flattens into a mere stripe of color down below. A sword motif, which recurs in several paintings, has a similar play that relieves the flatness of Momen’s symbolic silhouettes pressed tightly against the picture plane. And “Tristan and Isolde” does the same with a patch of dark color lyrically sweeping forward to become a ship’s sail.
The reduction of each opera and play to a handful of instantly recognizable motifs inevitably suggests the kind of enterprise involved in poster design, a suggestion that the museum’s own use of “Hamlet” for an exhibition poster bears out. This rather minimizes the profundity the artist seems to be after, though viewers should not sniff at how the paintings succeed as posters, as such design also requires a kind of mastery and Momen does not disappoint.
At 5211 N. Clark St., through Sept. 5. 773-728-8111.
