By Georgia Marett
In the first showing of their installation work in Australia, Japanese artist Aki Onda explores themes of memory, sound, and transmission (of ideas, light, emotions and media).
The exhibition consists of four rooms, each with a different idea and work. The pieces draw you in; the great thing about multimedia or installation art is that it makes you be patient – you cannot experience it faster than the artist allows.
The first room in the exhibition has more than a hundred bells (of the handheld variety), all waiting to be played. I was lucky enough to attend the artist talk and see Onda playing some of his many bells. The sounds he got out of them were so unexpected and mesmerising – I hope the Substation has more opportunities for people to hear them in action.
Another room captures attempts to contact the spirit of a Korean artist using FM radios, with the results projected onto the walls (this is much more interesting than it sounds as it uses live FM radio waves generated by the artist, not a recording).
In the main room, Onda has placed his work 2014 on one wall. This project involved the artist recording sounds of his life every day of the year 2014 – each day gets its own colourful cassette on the wall. I would have loved to hear the tape for the day I visited; at the moment you can only imagine what a day in 2014 sounded like to the artist.
The room that I spent the most time in has a looping video of the artist, knee deep in the waves on New York’s industrial shore, stacking rocks and bits of rebar concrete (Stack until it falls). This room is both calming and frustrating – the noises of the rocks and concrete being stacked and the waves crashing in are soothing, but there is a slight frustration as the stacks are constantly being reordered and redone. In the end there is the ultimate satisfaction of the stacks tumbling into the waves with a crash. The artist filmed this at the start of COVID when he said the phrase (stack until it falls) was stuck in his head as New York spiralled into a crisis.
This is not a long exhibit – you probably only need half an hour – but it is well worth doing. Go and immerse yourself in the different sounds, think about how we transmit ideas and feelings using different media, across different times, and what we are leaving our mark on now.
On at The Substation, Newport until 12 April
