Chinatown, New York
Skip Laplante
48 Wind Chimes
Orient15 Orient presents 48 Wind Chimes, a site-specific sound installation by experimental composer and instrument builder Skip Laplante. Featuring an array of chimes suspended above Cortlandt Alley and installed across the gallery's seven east-facing windows, the exhibition centers on a recurring motif within Laplante’s five-decade exploration of the sonic possibilities of ordinary objects and the minimal components of instrumental form. Each chime realizes a distinct acoustic constellation that emerges as much through discovery as invention—a collaboration between the artist and the intrinsic properties of his collected materials. Activated by the wind, the works further attenuate the artist's authorial control, and when gathered together, generate a shifting acoustic field whose innumerable interactions exceed any fixed compositional scheme. For this installation, Laplante responds to the unique acoustics and airflow of Cortlandt Alley, collaborating with the gallery to outfit each chime with an improvised wind-catching "sail". 48 Wind Chimes will remain on view in Cortlandt Alley, day and night, through July 11th. Skip Laplante (b. 1951) lives and works in New York. He is perhaps most well known for his role as a longtime member of the Gamelan Son of Lion, a new music repertory ensemble specializing in contemporary pieces written for the instruments of the Javanese gamelan. Founded in 1976, Son of Lion is one of the oldest continuous gamelan orchestras in the United States. Laplante received a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Princeton University in 1973 and moved into a loft in New York in 1975. Shortly thereafter, he formed ‘Music for Handmade Instruments’ with Carole Weber. Notable exhibitions include: “American Musical Instruments and Their Makers”, Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1977. Notable composer roles include: “Tongues/ Savage Love” a theater production by Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard which toured throughout the US and Europe, 1980 and “Second Species”, an opera parody, composed and developed alongside Keith King, 1986 - 1987, New York. Starting in 1991 Laplante has worked with the group “Bash the Trash”, with which he explored acoustics and musical instrument design through presentations at schools. He has worked as a teaching artist with The New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, The Brooklyn Philharmonic, Young Audiences New York, Materials for the Arts, the Open Classroom Collaborative, and as Composer in Residence at the Flushing Town Hall (2016). He will travel to Bar Harbor (ME) this summer to perform at the Bar Harbor Music Festival (BHMF) a festival that he’s been associated with for the past 6 years.