Serj Tankian’s summary work have advanced layers of a handful of colours that evoke a deep emotional longing that may be arduous to explain. However his works come alive in surprising methods when accompanied by music he composed particularly for them.
“I see music and visible artwork as extensions of the identical soul. After I paint, I’m composing. After I compose, I’m portray,” Tankian stated in a press release shared with Hyperallergic. “Every informs the opposite in methods phrases can’t categorical.”
“The entire concept of musically composed work is one thing I’ve been considering for a very long time,” Tankian continued. “As an artist, I’ve all the time wished to go to an exhibition, placed on headphones, and hearken to a bit of music, identical to movies.”
Guests to the Armenian Museum of America in Watertown, Massachusetts, can expertise the Grammy Award-winning System of a Down vocalist’s imaginative and prescient in a brand new exhibition, The Artwork of Disruption: The Artwork and Affect of Serj Tankian, that opened this month and can stay on view by February. The gallery includes a sequence of Tankian’s unique summary work and their accompanying musical clips, in addition to video installations, poems, and artifacts.
Viewers also can obtain the Arloopa app — which Tankian developed with an Armenian designer — level their cellphone at a portray, and hearken to orchestral preparations of keyboards, guitars, and violins that Tankian composed to accompany each bit. The choices vary from one to 24 minutes, however most are the size of a mean pop tune.
“Museums are comparatively silent whenever you’re viewing work outdoors of an occasion, however whenever you make the most of these compositions that he created, it’s not silent,” Jason Sohigian, the museum’s govt director, advised Hyperallergic. “It’s an expertise you’re listening to and seeing on the similar time.”
Tankian had the concept of coupling musical compositions with work for a number of years. He thought of writing music for different artists’ work, but it surely didn’t give him as a lot pleasure as pairing his music together with his personal work.
“Sooner or later, I simply thought to myself, ‘I’ve this composition and I actually need to paint.’ How do I make this work?” Tankian stated. “Fortunately I preferred my first portray. In any other case, I wouldn’t have continued.”
The museum has lengthy showcased the work of latest artists who reinterpret the story of the Armenian diaspora and the ramifications of the nation’s century-old genocide that reverberate right now.
The Beirut-born rock star first grew to become acquainted with the museum after seeing its show of Jack Kevorkian’s artworks in 2011, whereas he was on the town for a manufacturing of Prometheus Sure, a musical which he had scored.
That began a dialog with Sohigian about his personal work, which might later embody his memoir, Down with the System (2024).
“Serj had began portray, and he additionally got here out together with his memoir, the place he put out quite a lot of stuff about his life story and his involvement with music,” Sohigian stated. “He began a gallery on his personal in Los Angeles that exhibited his work, and he has additionally proven in New Zealand.”
Ryann Casey, a New Jersey-based artist who curated the exhibition, stated Tankian emphasised the interconnectedness of his poetry, music, and visible artwork, and the meditative side of constructing every of them.
“I don’t typically get an opportunity to curate musicians,” she stated. “Armenian historical past is essential to me, and seeing somebody categorical that historical past and himself by these three totally different modes was an fascinating problem.”
Tankian’s works is probably not overtly political, however they carry quiet echoes of genocide recognition, environmental justice, and cultural id, with titles comparable to“Music Is a Doorway to the Fact,” “Ethnic Trigger,” and “Violent Violins.” His poetry explores connections to his activism with traces about craving for peace.
“I don’t assume any of us have shied away from that activism,” Casey stated. “Hopefully, folks take a look at these by totally different lenses.”
