Wayne Smith
Come On, Let’s Go

December 1 – January 13, 2023
Reception December 1, 5-8pm

Et al. etc.
2831a Mission
San Francisco, CA 94110

Acoustic Mine

-for Wayne Smith on the occasion of Come On, Let’s Go

Ballpoint pen lines within a border make a field. Horizontal and vertical layers. Ink color may change but primarily holds black and blue, occasionally red, white maybe here or there. These lines are very close together hence the necessary magnifying glasses worn while drawing. Drawing as scoring. Scoring tracts. Musical layers in lines of repose: that is to say, tranquility in a repetitive gesture. Expanding a field, fluctuating scale, a surface abstraction on a small block of wood, the parameters are pre-set to get the job done. This is a practice of precision attaching discipline to freedom. Plotting. Hours pass. Generating work because it talks back until you are both finished with the feeling.

In ‘Lyric Multiples’ George Albon wrote, “…..suppose you are engaged, for a minute or a few hours or any stretch of time, in a phenomenally rich activity in which “the verbal” plays no part. That you are fully and intricately responsive and absorbed and in no doubt about the special nature of the experience. What do you bring back from this place the next time you handle words?”

Resonance, perhaps with accidents and small indentations in the wood grain. This designated field time stamps the exactitude of charting. Yet simultaneously breathes with whatever. Correspondences are in process sampling clustered efforts of different days and deeper nights. One can continually cycle through the vibrational sheen in silence.

There are also bits of clay coordinates and paper markers on the wall. A single note surfaces synecdoche while parallel tracks in an expanding register reconstellate on the wall. Three inches now reveals thirty. Room enough to set another score. This is not a display of art object-hood as much as it is a section of a seven-year time signature. Recomposed and performed as an installation.

But I’m pretty sure it goes back even further than seven years. Albon quoted the artist Mel Chin’s phrase “compounded expression”….. “actions effected in one domain setting off conversational potentials in other ones ….sounding and thinking inside living…in the manner of an exploded view rather than an explanation. It presumes the excursional.”

Come on let’s go.

With momentum’s careful treatment of a feeling. To revel in the echo while memory faints away and loops again. Through the General Electric Porta-Fi which was a tube-powered speaker in our back room. The electrical surge of the power dial physically clicking between my rolling fingers while Alan Shepard played golf on the moon and the war in Vietnam got worse.

Pam Martin
Nov. 2023 Lyric Multiples, George Albon, Nightboat Books, 2018

Come on let’s go, Broadcast https://youtu.be/Zw5ztuhEat4?si=ZF1ZouD-AWx2jFe3

Snapshots 1971-77, Michael Lesy, Blast Books, 2021