Art-loving students, some donning thick plastic frames and mint green jeans, waited patiently last Thursday at the Cesar Chavez Student Center’s Art Gallery, where the unveiling of the new exhibition, “Unfettered,” was running 45 minutes late.

As the first sound installation piece in the art gallery’s entire history, Joshua Churchill’s show was the second exhibit this semester, after “Irresistible Small Creatures,” to feature a site-specific piece, using art created especially for the particular space.

“[Churchill’s art] worked with my theme of site-specific work,” said Jaime Schwartz, the Art Gallery manager who choose Churchill for her site-specific series. “We [at the gallery] want to challenge how people interact with the space and how the artist manipulates it.”

After achieving a bachelor’s in art from UC Santa Barbara with an emphasis on print and video in 1998, Churchill began installations and work in soundscapes that have been featured not only in Bay Area art spaces like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and SomArts, but in galleries across the world, from Japan to Portugal.

In “Unfettered,” Churchill’s sound installation caused onlookers to approach him in awe and with questions.

By using borrowed chairs from the Student Center, Churchill piled up each one carefully to shape a dome over sound equipment, which transmitted a looped recording of the falling, crashing chairs during its construction. With each sound, a pulsating light underneath the equipment illuminated each crash and each fumble.

Through his solo work as the band T/R, and his collaboration in the band Vis Viva, Churchill’s experience as a noise musician and distortion guitarist allowed him to use sound as another means of material for his art. By adding a deep continuous drone that encircled the booming sounds Churchill’s soundscape was reminiscent of minimalist composer Le Monte Young or German band Faust, who used droning sounds often in their music.

“I consider sound a material,” Churchill said. “It is a slow, ever-changing thing.”
In the dimly-lit gallery, a short collection of digital images, which were originally found transparency slides, also adorned the room.

Featuring scenes that would commonly be overlooked, like a cloudy skyline and sleepy parking lot, Churchill’s manipulation of the images presented on snow white walls revealed Churchill’s confessed fascination with finding beauty and art through the mundane and broken.

From a seashore image, which Churchill described as an entry point or place of natural beginning, to the last image of an “exit way,” of a dimly lit doorway and windows, the artist took and physically manipulated them by scratching, scorching, and altering them before making the digital copies presented.

Audience members, like Sam Brown, 20, a creative writing major, felt that the charred images, which gave some pieces an illuminated look, gave a feeling that was alien and out of this world.

“He turns ordinary objects into a nilhilistic description of the world,” Brown said of his interpretation of Churchill’s exhibition. “Like something celestial.”

“I hope people will look at it differently than a typical store painting,” Churchill said of his theme of destruction and decay reconstructed into art form. “I like those things that are unpredictable…where work is decaying in front of your eyes.”

Despite a delay opening the exhibit to the public, due to last minute touches on the chair sound installation, the exhibit was well received by viewers who packed the gallery found Churchill’s provocative work to be mature, sinister and frightening.

“It’s complex and multi-layered,” Brown said. “It foreshadows something dark.”

Natasha Emter, a 21-year-old art major, agreed.

“I came in and it sort of threw me off,” Emter said of the show’s ominous mood. “When I came in I felt that the chairs were going to attack me.”