Hallock Hill

Physics. That’s where I find the wonder in John Chamberlain’s work. Solid surfaces take on an ephemeral lightness, while the spaces between can bear immense weight. Load gets shifted continually. His work with polychromatic metal car parts made a physicist out of a man who found objects and re-purposed them into art and idea. The viewer starts to question the original object — the art inherent in it — as well as the acts of decay and discarding, discovery and transformation. There is so much movement in his pieces, movement of heavy metals, movement of glistening colors and chrome, movement of space and non-space. And he could achieve his effect at any scale, from the small works that can fit in your hand to the immense pieces whose ribbons of steel stand like reeds stilling but reflecting a very modern world. But to compare them to something else is wrong. Each has its own beauty. And its own science. Physics is upended – gravity gets questioned in the positions of the materials Chamberlain fixes. They are dance and music.

Chamberlain’s sculptures have influenced me and my music in a thousand ways, encouraging me to search for how the weight of sound can be made light and the seeming weightlessness of silence can be made heavy. His work says so much about intersection, about boundary, about how things overlap. Voices coming and going, time still and moving, sounds here and gone. Chamberlain discovered a new formula, time after time.