In From Music to Sound: Being as Time in the Sonic Arts, theorist Christopher Cox proposes that the difference between music and sound is their distinct relationship to time and being. Sound encompasses all, while music is delineated by arrangement and choice. The late 20^th century’s displacement of sound over music as an object of cultural fascination signals “an ontological shift from being to becoming and a temporal shift from time to duration.”

Sandra Meigs’ most recent body of work All to All is full: full of noise, full of loud paintings, full of things clamouring. It is a six-and-a-half-week-long party, with really good vibes. Noise-makers filled with rocks, marbles, and children’s shoes endlessly make noise. Unclocks tik-tok to announce time’s existence, but lacking hands or symbols, present it as relative rather than successive. Groups upon groups of small round paintings, one-hundred-fifty in total, hang around jostling for attention. Their jubilance gives us energy. We are lifted up. A set of round paintings pose on easels – large and brash – they are a swirl of colors objects, and beings caught mid-happening. An assortment of grey plaster EGO disks litter the ground. On the second floor, a band of golden-robed robotic spectres take turns rotating within spiral yellow walls.

The amplitude of all this fullness cannot be contained. Like sound, it rounds corners, it goes upstairs, it invades our analytical mind – driving thoughts out, it forces us to experience. While music necessitates a ‘closing off’ through the act of composition, selection, and its relationship to a temporal event, sound is open to all the world and beyond. As Cox concludes, sound gives “us a glimpse of the virtual whole…[it is] a continuous and heterogeneous fluid material….” The work in All to All has no beginning and no end. It is pure climax. As Meigs’ explains: It’s easy. The more you do, the more you do. You keep going. You keep spinning.


chau gong performance daily at 1 pm