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Correspondence Table is a program organized in conjunction with Laurel Sparks’ FiftyTwo Ft. commission titled Quad Relay. Sparks and sound artist Shawn E. Hansen maintain a collaboration that explores correspondences between sound, poetry, chance and visual systems. The artists will discuss their methods of using mathematical poetry, dice, string figures, sound and symbols to generate unpredictable structures. They will screen an excerpt from a video-in-progress that combines Hansen’s related sound and photos with their collaborative poems. The evening will conclude with a live sound performance by Hansen using historic Just Intonation and immersive drone systems to translate elements from Quad Relay.

About FiftyTwo Ft: Laurel Sparks

Quad Relay by Laurel Sparks is the most recent work in Knockdown Center’s FiftyTwo Ft. series of commissioned wall-based artworks in the East Corridor. Quad Relay is the artist’s largest work to date, and its compositional logic is derived from the sestina, a complex form of mathematical poetry structured by six stanzas organized in numbered sequences. Sparks assigns points and directional lines specific colors, numbers, and elements according to the sestina’s structure, creating a self-generating algorithm that determines the painting’s geometric tableaux. An irregular grid underlies the composition, producing an almost kinetic, shimmering presence akin to dazzle camouflage, refusing fixed identity and yielding instead to perceptual flux. Learn more about the work here.

About the presenters

Shawn E Hansen is a composer, improviser, phonographer, and piano technician. His main instruments include synthesizer, organ, piano, and saxophone. He is the 2018 Charlotte Street Performing Arts Fellow. Practicing his own style of Great-Plains hermetic art known as Tangential Assertivism, he performs with Neal Wilson (L.A.), Chris Forsyth (PA), Laurel Sparks (NY), and makes films with Cyrus Console. Tangential Assertivism is the practice of observing the relationship between disparate thought-objects placed in close proximity spatially or temporally. Shawn runs KJEA-radio, a transmitted conceptual space first broadcast in 1984. He studied with Maryanne Amacher, Richard Teitelbaum, George Lewis, and Pauline Oliveros at Bard in 2001.

Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work embodies geometric symbol systems and the transmitting potential of pattern and materiality. She holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston, MA. Her exhibitions include solo shows at Kate Werble, NYC and group shows at Cheim and Read NYC; LX, NYC; Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, NYC; Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; Berman Museum at Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA; Elizabeth Foundation Gallery, NYC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; and Art In General, NYC.