all images courtesy the dixon gallery and gardens
Tonight with a constant buzz (2024)
Scott A. Carter has worked in the field of art installation for years. He’s worn the nitrile gloves to handle priceless works when he worked as a preparator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He’s hung framed photographs on the walls of Christian Brothers University’s Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery, which he runs in his capacity as assistant professor of art. He’s placed pieces in tempered-glass display cases at local museums as an occasional art handler. It’s a delicate practice, art installation — a practice that Carter was ready to disrupt.
His artistic troublemaking started with the display cases. As a sculptor, Carter says, “I was interested in using the surface to add jacks and cut holes, and treat them as a material, not so much like it’s going to preserve something.”
So, without much of a plan, he took a display case, laser-cut a hole, inverted a corner, added guitar cables, electronic components with exposed wiring, a silk plant, and topped it with a beer bottle. Now, it works as an amplifier of sorts. “You can plug [your instrument] in, and there’s three different modes you can switch between, and it’ll distort,” Carter says. “I ended up adding a contact mic too.” Even without an instrument plugged in, the piece will make a loud buzzing sound, disrupting the typically quiet gallery space.
The works display the exposed circuitry of their sound components, which can include 3D-printed parts, tubing, microphones, amplifiers, cables — and sometimes beer bottles.
This piece, titled Energy States and made in 2023, would become the first of many semi-functional sculptures by Carter. For the first time, when he goes in to create a piece, he doesn’t have a plan; he just lets inspiration take over. “It’s a mashup of all the things that I like, furniture-ish design, electronics, engineering,” he says. “For years, I tried to combine my musical interests, interest in electronics with art, but they were always separate things.”
Many of these pieces now make up the “Energy States” exhibition, on display at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens through January 19th. “I think with this show,” Carter says, “I finally got it to the point where I feel like, oh, everything together, I’m happy. Which is weird.”
Carter, originally from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, has always been a creative type, but he wasn’t always serious about his art or his music. He may have taken an art class here or there while in high school, but it was really his parents who encouraged his talents. “When I graduated high school, they said, ‘You have to go to art school because you’re going to fail out of college.’ They knew I liked to party too much. My parents are both teachers; I think they’d both seen enough students to know [what kind of student I was].”
So in 2003, he went to Atlanta College of Art, now part of Savannah College of Art and Design. That’s where he slowly got more serious about art and started playing the drums. “So kind of a similar timeline [for developing my music and art],” Carter says. At this time, he also met his wife, Johana Moscoso, a fellow artist and current residency coordinator at Crosstown Arts.
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Burden (the refrain) (2024)
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Energy States (2023)
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Halcyon (2024)
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Merged/Split (2024)
“But I would say I was more heavily focused on art than music for a long time,” Carter says, “From 2010 or so, after grad school [for sculpture at School of the Art Institute of Chicago], 2011, I got back into music, but I spent all my time doing that and not making art. And I thought, ‘Man, this isn’t sustainable. I can’t build electronics and make music for a whole year and then do one piece.’ I would always be a little depressed.”
“One day, I thought ‘Why am I not showing all the electronics?’ I was already making little synthesizers with plexiglass cases where you could see all this stuff. And I realized, ‘That looks really cool.’ But I never thought that it could be an art object.” — Scott Carter
At the time, he says, he was making “grad school serious sculptures” out of drywall with references to art history. “I got really tired of making that stuff” until one day in 2012 he made a drumset out of drywall. It didn’t incorporate everything — electronics, design, engineering, like Energy States would. But, from that point, Carter says, “I kept trying to get it all to work together, so I wasn’t compromising one or the other. And so now, 12 years later, I finally, finally got to a point where I’m like, ‘Wow, this is good for me.’”
With “Energy States,” Carter intended to reference mid-century modern and art deco radio cabinets in terms of design and construction “because back then they were building these towers with speakers built in and a record player on top.” And the pieces in his Dixon exhibition do resemble these styles with clean lines and the simple use of materials.
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Perfect in an empty room (2024)
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Passing Time I (2023)
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Passing Time II (2023)
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Summer in abandon (Abandon) (2024)
A motif of grids appears throughout the works, a nod to music recorded on a time-based grid and his work using CNC routers, laser cutters, and 3D-rendering, the technological aspects in his sculptural practice. Visually, for some pieces, the precision of the grids contrast with the curling of wires, tubing, and cables that loop from point to point, revealing the exposed circuitry of the sound components.
There was a time, though, before he embraced this exposed wiring. “One day, I thought ‘Why am I not showing all the electronics?’” he says. “I was already making little synthesizers with plexiglass cases where you could see all this stuff. And I realized, ‘That looks really cool.’ But I never thought that it could be an art object.”
He also felt that way about some of his staple pieces in his exhibit — his speakers made of stacked beer bottles. “The first one I did [Passing Time], I thought it was really kind of stupid, but my wife saw it and said, ‘Oh, I really like this; you should keep making these.’”
The others would be Passing Time (II), Microcosm, and Memento Mori. The artist and his friends consumed all the bottles of beer, which are used throughout, during the process of making these pieces.
Carter, it turns out, had been thinking about Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, whose art was once on display at the Kohler Arts Center where he worked as a preparator. Von Bruenchenhein made towers and thrones from painted chicken bones.
For Carter, the pieces in “Energy States” remind him of toys. “That’s exactly what all instruments are to me,” he says. “They’re like grown-up toys.”
“They became these religious-looking relics and monuments to some material that he consumed,” Carter says. “So in a similar way I was doing that with these pieces, and I ended up incorporating the bottles into everything. At some point I started stacking and kind of playing with them, then stripping them down to their components, just the glass, and sort of putting this care into cleaning them and treating them, and they became more like markers of time.”
For Momento Mori, which translates from Latin to “remember you will die,” Carter presents a speaker made of stacked, partially filled bottles of sand. “An obvious reference to an hourglass,” Carter says. “I’m just thinking about time and getting older.”
Aluminum casts of Carter’s fingers, made from beer cans, point from the 3D-printed hardware on Momento Mori, as if implicating the viewer in impending mortality as well. The artist also includes a cast of his nose in Path to mindfulness (the power of breath). This piece is more of a reflection on social anxiety, rather than an anxiety about passing time. With a simple flick of a switch, an air compressor pushes air through bottles and tubes to a condenser mic to reference, the artist says, “nervous breathing.”
The intention of Carter and the Dixon was to have all these pieces plugged in, to allow the viewer to be able to turn them on and off “with some degree of caution,” but since “Energy States” opened in November, “Do Not Touch” signs have been put in place due to some careless behavior from visitors. Perhaps, in a more intimate environment, Carter says, the pieces could remain on, though he worries the noise might bother gallery staff in a typically quiet setting. “It can be very loud,” he says. “Very loud.”
For Carter, the pieces in “Energy States” remind him of toys. “That’s exactly what all instruments are to me,” he says. “They’re like grown-up toys.”
From the artist building the pieces with his 3D printer and connecting them (“like K’Nex,” he says) to the interactions potential viewers can have by flipping switches or reacting to built-in sensors, Carter’s work allows the opportunity for play in unexpected places.
“I do get joy from looking at them,” he says, “and plugging them in a way that I haven’t gotten from other work I’ve made.”
But in just their visual aspect the pieces are playful, with the Dixon’s wall text inviting the viewer up close to engage with all the elements layered under plexiglass and in display cases from all sides. Even their hardware requires close inspection, as Carter has 3D-printed and faceted most of it himself.
Though this exhibit will close this month, Carter plans to continue in this style of work and to experiment with the sound systems in new environments. “I was surprised and honored when the Dixon asked me to show here,” he says. “And one day, maybe, I’ll get them in an environment, where they can all exist and play really loud.”
“Scott A. Carter: Energy States” is on display at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens through January 19th.
