Listening with Nate Lewis

“Look at the room downstairs,
Look at the garden outside 
Don’t try to analyze it
Just take it in”
- Milford Graves

It can be difficult to feel content doing just one thing. Even during a pandemic, many still feel compelled to be productive or otherwise continue to strive in the mythic capitalist journey of work, money, and happiness. The ethos of multi-tasking keeps us juggling multiple ideas at once and cripples our attention to detail. Distraction abounds on every screen,  programmed into every algorithm. However, many artists explore alternative ways of being that disrupt this logic of diversified consumption and elevate sensorial experience. As practitioners of mindfulness, they encourage us to focus on just one thing: listening.

Signaling XXIV (2020)
Hand-sculpted inkjet print, ink, graphite, frottage; 55" h x 36"w

The last public event I physically attended before New York City shut down due to the coronavirus / COVID-19 pandemic was the March 11 artist talk for Nate Lewis’ exhibition Latent Tapestries. Every seat in the gallery was full for a far-ranging discussion that just a week later could not have taken place in that same format. Lewis discussed his work, ideas, and inspirations with curator and educator Niama Safia Sandy along side writer and music critic Giovanni Russonello. The exhibition featured a new series of works on paper, new works from an ongoing series, and the artist’s first video installation. Latent Tapestries also included a sound installation, and throughout the conversation sounds swarmed around and ensconced the room. 

Lewis explained that during his time as a nurse in a surgical unit, sound and listening were “critical to understanding the condition of the patient.” The theory  of “sounding” rather than reading or writing histories was discussed as a framework for discovering the waves and musicality that might exist within something. Sandy proffered that music might be a “signal boost for setting new truth and vision.” Russonello made the juicy remark that jazz “tenderizes” the viewer/listener. Among many sonic revelations, the panel repeatedly praised an artist named Milford Graves.

A big circle surrounds Graves’ name in my notes. Lewis lit up when speaking of the 2018 documentary, Milford Graves Full Mantis, a critically acclaimed film which explores the polymath percussionist and sonic adventurer. More meditation than movie, Full Mantis is equal parts essay film, music video, and documentary. The camera follows Graves -- who is an accomplished musician, visual artist, engineer, and cardiac cartographer -- through his practice which is guided by natural rhythms in all their forms. Operating as a clinician and producer, he opposes the sterile and unnatural metronomic time system and listens to his own heartbeat to then improvise and elaborate musically. 

In many ways, this is how Lewis works. Trained in the medical field and attuned to invisible rhythms, Lewis deploys interdisciplinary approaches to making art. While much has been written about Lewis’ visual art practice, more attention should be paid to the way he sculpts with sound. Just as he seems to transmute paper into silk, he is sensitive to the ways in which listening is a radical act connected to neuroplasticity and the potential for sounds to “carve out new pathways.” This yields an art so deeply rooted in sound and the body that it may inspire a new dance. The site-specific sound installation projected from speakers throughout the exhibition space and now available on the gallery’s soundcloud and exhibition site is an overlooked (underheard?) aspect of this work.

Lewis designed the soundscape for the Fridman Gallery so that sound would not play the same role as the visual art or clash, but instead accompany the polyphonic movements of atmosphere and texture in the framed works. While Lewis was responsible for mixing the final euphonic installation, the individuals tracks are contributions from musicians Luke Stewart, Melanie Charles, Kassa Overall, Ben LaMar Gay, and Matana Roberts. These are some of the most exciting musicians composing new music today in avant-garde styles adjacent to jazz, noise, and experimental music. Rather than painting the walls to set a scene, Lewis and his collaborators created a unique environment for the gallery space using sound.

Playing with how sounds could stretch and blend in many dimensions, Lewis routed the mix of tracks around corners and into the basement, noting that music is “the most elastic and accessible medium.” Stewart produced a hypnotic ambient piece that Lewis likened to “pure electricity” -- the charge eventually bubbled back up through the floor as if in a seismic event. Charles opened her composition with flute, and also incorporated the sound of telephones ringing as a reminder of time and the notifications we use to keep track of our lives. Gay’s hooves began around a repeated sample of vocals that swam in circles until making way for a haunting flute-driven sequence. The flutes and tambourines in these works harken back not only to early musical instruments but also to the music of historical military processions. The possibility for music to take you back hundreds or thousands of years— to violence or safety— is important for Lewis, and stronger for him than the transportive potential found in painting or architecture.

Probing the Land V (2020); Hand-sculpted inkjet print, ink, graphite, frottage; 44" h x 62"w

Deep listening is one of the most important modes of attention one could pay to their subject. The American composer Pauline Oliveros first coined the term deep listening with an album by the same name released in 1989. Recorded within a monumental underground cistern in Washington State, Oliveros and her collaborators Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis recorded just over an hour of meditative material that soothes and surprises. A listener to this work has the chance to focus solely on sound and create something of a sensory deprivation tank for themselves that opens into an expanded terrain of consciousness, with acoustic input as the only pathway.

In addition to music making, Oliveros wrote extensively on deep listening and the relationship between meditation, consciousness, and sound. She differentiated between hearing and listening: “to hear is the physical means that enable perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.” 

With Latent Tapestries and now in light of important uprisings that call out  white supremacy and police violence, it is important to re-commit an intentional focus on sound. Listening deeply to the body or to the cosmos can improve our understanding of ourselves and others, even breaking down the distinctions between self and other altogether, to allow sound to fully envelop all. Lewis shared with me that he explicitly credits “listening to music and to various sonic textures” as informing his “understanding of visual patterns and rhythms.” These gorgeous patterns and rhythms were on clear display at the Fridman Gallery show. 

Probing the Land IV (2020); Hand-sculpted inkjet print, ink, graphite, frottage; 44" h x 62"w