David Horvitz

(US)

Work:
Some Meditations for Resonating Hourglasses Sounding the Shapes of Hours, 2017. Blown glass; dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin

Venue:
Kling & Bang

Work:
Watering a Glass Flower, 2017. Performance by JFDR

Venue:
Mengi, Saturday, October 7, 21.00

Work:
Proposals for Clocks (A Clock that Falls Asleep, A Clock that Follows the Shadows of Cats, A Clock whose Hands are the Shapes of Rivers, A Clock whose Seconds are Synchronized to your Heartbeat), 2016-ongoing. Screen-printed posters wheat-pasted across Reykjavík. Courtesy the artist, ChertLüdde, Berlin, and Yvon Lambert, Paris

Venue:
Streets of Reykjavik

Work:
When the Ocean Sounds, 2017. Sound performance, musical score. Courtesy the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin

Venue:
Marshall House, Sunday, October 15

In his practice, David Horvitz suggests alternative methods of conceiving time, space, and synergy, incorporating both new and ancient technologies to measure, record, and transmit our distances. He often draws from long-established rhythms for human perceptions of time, such as the sunset and sunrise, or the unit of a single breath, to demonstrate how relationships, communication, and technology form a network of rituals in and outside of time. Beginning with an initial act, online post, or image, his works gain momentum through word of mouth, physical movement, or online distribution. Because they operate across real and virtual distances, the works often coalesce into absurd narratives. His past works have involved impersonation, self-substitution, and a viral effect, which destabilizes the notion of the unique art object or artist and finds inspiration in the possibilities of endless reproducibility. Horvitz’s wry exchanges with anonymous audiences challenge our societal constitutions of boundaries while providing alternate systems or rhythms of time and communication.

For Sequences VIII, Horvitz presents Some Meditations for Resonating Hourglasses Sounding the Shapes of Hours (2015/2017), sculptures of hourglasses at Kling & Bang Gallery, each of which is made from colored glass that echoes the colors of the sky at different points throughout the day. Instead of being used in their traditional capacity, these hourglasses will be filled with water and will function as instruments in a collaboration with Icelandic musician and composer Jófríður Ákadóttir (JFDR) for her performance Watering a Glass Flower (2017). JFDR will play the hourglasses in a layered composition in which time is experienced visually, aurally, and metaphorically. Creating these vessels out of molds from a collection of hourglasses that he found online, Horvitz imbues their defined, quantified measurements with subjectivity, assigning a sound to the units of time that they are meant to carry. Along with his hourglasses, the piece includes a text that is available as a takeaway in the gallery, which offers meditations on thinking beyond standardized measurements of time. In addition to this work, Horvitz presents Proposals for Clocks (2017) a limited edition of posters which offer ideas for alternative clocks in sync with natural rhythms. He will also stage a performance at the closing event for Sequences VIII that features a score that he created of the sounds of the ocean, designed for a choir to perform. For this work, Horvitz went out to a beach below Donald Trump’s golf course in Palos Verdes, California with his computer and typed the sounds that he heard with the characters of the English alphabet. With this performance, as with many of Horvitz’s works that provide counterpoint to our age of virtual connectedness, the viewer is reminded of the physical world and of the fact that they exist somewhere unique, both spatially and temporally.

Associated events:

David Horvitz