Richard Chartier (b.1971), sound/installation artist and graphic designer, has created critically acclaimed recordings for labels such as 12k/LINE (USA), Raster-Noton (Germany), Die Stadt (Germany), Spekk (Japan), NonVisualObjects (Austria), Mutek_rec (Canada), DSP (Italy), ERS (Netherlands), and Trente Oiseaux (Germany), including collaborations with noted artists Taylor Deupree, William Basinski, COH, and Asmus Tietchens and has appeared on numerous international compilations. His digital minimalist work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, and the act of listening.

Chartier's sound works and sound installations have been presented internationally including at the exhibits Sounding Spaces at ICC (Tokyo, Japan), I Moderni / The Moderns at Castello di Rivoli (Torino, Italy), 2002 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Resynthesis at The Art Institute of Chicago and with the travelling sound exhibit Invisible Cities created by digital media curators Fehler as well as solo and collaborative installations for Fusebox (DC), 1515 Arts/G Fine Art (DC), Die Schachtel (Milan, Italy), and Diapason (NY). He has performed his work live across Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America at MUTEK (Montreal, Canada), GRM/Maison de Radio France (Paris, France), ICA (London, UK), Observatori (Valencia, Spain), DEAF (Dublin, Ireland), Transmediale (Berlin, Germany), Lovebytes (Sheffield, UK), The Leeds International Film Festival (Leeds,UK), The Rotterdam International Film Festival (NE), Garage (Stralsund, Germany), La Batie (Geneva, switzerland), and other noted digital art/music festivals and at exhibits such as Frequenzen [Hz] at the Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany) and A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968 and Visual Music at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles).

In 2000 he formed the recording label LINE and has since curated its continuing documentation of compositional and installation work by international sound artists and composers exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism. The premiere release on LINE, Chartier's Series was awarded Honorable Mention in the category of Digital Music by the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica, 2001 (Austria). In 2006 he was commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden to create a collaborative sound performance work in conjunction with the Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibit. This work, entitled Specification.Fifteen was recently awarded one of five Honorable Mentions for outstanding contemporary artistic positions in digital media art by the Jury of Transmediale.07 Award Competition (Germany) and exhibited as a recording and premiered as a live performance with a new video work created from Sugimoto's Seascapes at the Akademie der Kuenste (Berlin) and subsequently at Issue Project Room (NY).

In 2007, Chartier, invited by the Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran, curated two evenings of video and sound at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and at G Fine Art in Washington, DC and Ellipse Art Center in Arlington, VA (USA), entitled ColorField REMIX with an array of internationally noted new media artists responding to the 1950s and 1960s Color Field visual art movement and the Washington Color School, as part of a city wide celebration of this historical movement. An updated and expanded program screening, Colorfield Variations has subsequently been shown at festivals in New York and Seattle (USA), Brussels (Belgium), and Tel Aviv (Israel) and continues to travel. Chartier has most recently been invited to curate an extensive time based media exhibition focusing on contemporary sound and video installation work at the Art Gallery of the University of Maryland (USA) scheduled for Fall 2009.

 

STATEMENT:
A significant element of my work over the past several years has been the use of digitally rendered sounds that necessitate a focused engagement on the part of the auditor. Soft and hushed--almost imperceptible--fragments, high frequencies, bursts, static and quiet, low, shifting tones create a complex textural field. Idealized as an asymtotic process of composition which approaches an unattainable paradigm of formalism, the evidence left of the work's creation speaks to an incremental and meticulous process of reduction. Sonic moments placed under a microscope for consideration and eventual emaciation; a cutting away or a deepening within and into an isolated microsecond. Compositional focus often occurs in the space between the sounds.

My work explores an implied silence that is not silent--the near-inaudible character of the sounds used belie the activity and energy of the composition itself. Generating a rich threshold between silence and sound that is meticulously structured, and in some cases cyclical, these pieces are often best experienced at low volumes or on headphones. My work tends to be sparse (or perceived as such) so that I may utilize this aspect to present compositional ideas and structures without extraneous elements impairing the conceptual clarity of each piece. With this I want to engage via listening as opposed to musicality.

The sounds that do occur are treated with a sculptural integrity. Each crackle and hiss is distinct, an instantiation of an auricular physicality that nonetheless proximally approaches silence. Nearly transparent, each discrete audio instance in my work depends upon a narrowed engagement by the listener in contradistinction to the standard experiences of every day hearing.

The narrative present in these patterns develops through a work's particular existence in time and the sonic levels and plateaus that serve as events within that temporal space. In this sense, a faint rhythm is created and can provide a degree of structuring continuity to the piece, but as the work develops that rhythm is progressively fragmented and dematerialized into spectral remnants of its original. Knowable cycles can slowly develop, but within any discernment of pattern comes the particular auditory variance of the lister's perception. In experiencing a stretched out and slowed down serial composition requiring attentive focus, the expected arrival of the next sound makes even the faintest change in rhythm, or introduction of alternate events, as significant as the spaces between the physical presences of sounds. Recently, my work has developed toward a more audible and less "silent" aesthetic space. Though dissimilar in this regard, the continued significance of reduction and structure within my artistic process links my earlier and present-day compositions.

As an installation, my work is recontextualized into site-specific, controlled environments. The listener/ viewer becomes imbued in the physicality of the sound and its perception in relationship to his/her placement within the space. These installations aim to redirect the listener/viewer's concentration and bring his/her attention to selective aspects of experiencing sound. I find that an empty gallery has the potential to mold an effective listening environment, or to create through the manipulation of sound a space of novel physical experience. This effect works upon those entering briefly or for extended periods of time, as the sound field shifts across the duration of the sound piece within the space. In a similar sense, the use of headphones in an installation provides the means to navigate the auditor into an even deeper area of attention, concentration, and focus. In line with my interests in expressions of form, i try to remove visual cues from these spaces and approach as closely as possible a state of non-referentiality within the work itself. An attempt at pure sound rather than visual art that makes sound, or the generation and experience of sound that does not depend upon a visual reference. An "object" such as a speaker or cable is treated as such, a means but not an end.

Over the past few years my work has evolved into a more audible "less silent" aesthetic and although dissimilar in some respects, through acts of reduction and structure, each work bears a relationship to the others. My work bears witness to the potentially interdependence and focus required of sound, silence and the process of listening itself.

 

IN PERFORMANCE:
My live performance differs perhaps most significantly from my recorded work by virtue of an increased audibility and activity. The sounds used are selected from a collection of predesigned sounds, culled from past compositions and unreleased work but chosen with attention to the space and situation in which they will be presented as part of a new performative composition. In this sense, a live piece works to bring sounds into new and more immediately dynamic relations, creating a compositional outline within which a degree of space exists for immediate and on-site improvisational effects and reworkings. Because a live performance occurs at a slightly louder volume than recorded compositions, and even further pulls the attention of the audience specifically to the experience of sound and its physicality, performances are best suited to take place within spaces that encourage the listener to circumvent other sensorial input especially of the visual sort. Minus the impinging presence of visual cues and, as much as possible, other audio stimuli disconnected from the performance itself, a live presentation of my work methodically cultivates attention. It encourages a listening environment where auditors may focus intently upon their capacity for hearing the presentation of sound, within a context and frame distinct from the more routine forms and practices of listening. Numerous audience members have often noted over the past several years on the transportative nature of the performance/experience and that a distinct displacement in their experience of time occurs in which they are no longer cognizant of the duration of the actual performance.

 

HONORS:

AWARD . Transmediale 2007 [ Berlin, Germany ] Honorable Mention for Specification.Fifteen
AWARD . Series Honorary Mention, Digital Music / PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA 2001 [ Linz, Austria ]
AWARD . James Madison University Art Achievement Award 1993
AWARD . James Madison University Best Studio Artist Award 1989-1993

EDUCATION:
Bachelor of Fine Arts Cum Laude
Concentration in Graphic Design and Painting
James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA) 1993