Art Wall: Caroline Kent - Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)

In her newly commissioned Art Wall project, Chicago-based artist Caroline Kent presents The Sounds Among Us which activates her unique abstract language as “musical notation for everyday sounds.” Moving fluidly between darker painted layers signifying “undertones” and colorful, foregrounded shapes representing “overtones”, the large-scale work embraces BAMPFA’s Crane Forum as a soundscape resonant with muted conversations, footsteps, and shuffling bodies, while punctuated by laughter, clapping, and speech. Kent’s dynamic visual composition provides a self-reflective yet otherworldly meditation on the museum as a site of intimate performance and public engagement. Known equally for her works on paper and for her choreographed live installations, Kent asks that her viewers become listening, sentient bodies in a multi-dimensional, and multi-sensory space, amidst her orchestration of new perceptual forms. The artist studied at...