D’Amelio Terras, New York
February 17 – March 24, 2007
In his first solo show at D’Amelio Terras Noah Sheldon will create a synesthetic environment using photography, sculpture, sound, and light. Like a story that sits between non-fiction and fable, the works here present us with pieces that are at once dissections and imaginations.
Sheldon has modified and amplified an upright piano to play notes at varying intervals, the reverberation of each tone is altered by the next, creating ongoing poly-rhythmic compositions. Based on a simple predetermined order, minute variations in the mechanism of the piano interact with the properties of amplification to create a continuously evolving and unpredictable soundscape. Other sculptural works, such as a fountain encased in a plywood box and a set of mechanized wind chimes made out of metal fence caps, express how a captivating aesthetic experience can be generated through prosaic means.
Sheldon creates visual counterpoints to the qualities of his sculptures in twelve black and white photographs. Based in the visual language of commercial landscape photography, these pictures parallel the exploration of structure, chance, beauty, and the everyday carried out elsewhere in the exhibition. A pair of large camera-less color photographs, one made from a high resolution scan of a peacock feather and the other by digitally superimposing printed pictures of the sun, offer a meditation on the emergent properties of pattern.
Holland Cotter in The New York Times review, March 4, 2005 states:
“… Mr. Sheldon alters, enhances and invents realities in large and small — and always very simple ways. He not only wants to transport us to someplace nice; he wants to make it extra nice.”
Noah Sheldon was born in Fort Wayne, IN. He first studied Percussion and New Music at New England Conservatory of Music, then received his BA with concentration in photography from Sarah Lawrence College, and graduated with an MFA from Columbia in 2000. In 2005 he had a solo show, “Almost Vegetarian”, at Southfirst, Brooklyn, NY. His work has been shown at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY; John Connelly Presents, New York, NY; and Dupreau gallery, Chicago, IL among others. In 2006 he curated a show titled “Mystic River” at Southfirst, Brooklyn, NY, which traveled to Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside, PA.
