"Pictures at an Exhibition" has happened at least twice before: the first, a composition
by Modest Mussorgsky meant to remember artist and architect Viktor Hartmann; the second, a live
rendition of said composition by the progressive British rock band, Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Mussorgsky's intention for the piece was to depict an imaginary tour of an art collection,
namely, selections of Hartmann's works, with each title allude to a certain piece and including
into his compositions interludes to travel from piece to piece by. It could thus be argued that
equal attention was placed by Mussorgsky on the pieces themselves as was placed on the gallery
as an environmental extension of Hartmann's work.

I do not share this focus.

This iteration of the name at present does not concern Viktor Hartmann, or Mussorgsky's original
composition, nor does it concern progressive British rock. The congruency of namesake,
Mussorgsky's and my own, is expressed solely in the intent of the piece. There remain
anachronistic variants in said intent, but where we have overlapped; the intent to translate
tonally the symbolic nature of ones visceral reaction to a work of art; Mussorgsky to Hartmann,
Myself to Rothko, is enough that it seemed proper to brandish the name once again.

Like Yves Klein's "Monotone Symphony," I wanted that, these musical arrangements be equivocal
audio translations of the pictorial image, like the single note, to Yves Klein's frames of pure
International Klein Blue.

The choice of Rothko felt obvious. The tonal and sonorous qualities I associated with Rothko's
large-scale paintings seem projected from the epicenter of his spatial relations between both
shape and color. Such innate acknowledgment of what most certainly feels like stentorian sound,
coming from an object relegated to the physics of color fields, is overwhelming. In this sense,
these paintings are reliant on the viewer, and their ancient connectivity to just such
biomorphic forms and color choices to produce inherent meaning, and internal music. These
paintings then are psychic mirrors.

Yet if the painting is a psychic mirror, reflecting our most ancient connectivity to the to the
aforementioned symbology, it's not complete until the viewer comes in contact with it, studies
it. My contact then has been represented by these audio recordings. These audio recordings
produced by Jeff and I are reflections of my contact. The subjectivity of my experience can be
seen as the natural variant of the collected consciousness, when gazing at a psychic mirror.

-Christian Oldham


Thank you: Jones, Witscher, Dutra, Bland, "Dean Chen"