EUGENE, Ore. -- (October 196, 2009) – Students passing through Building 3 on Portland Community College’s Rock Creek campus might notice the sound of operatic singing in the halls. If they follow the music into the Helzer Gallery, they’ll enter a space empty except for a clear sound dome suspended from the ceiling and a rear projected screen. Being projected is a scene of a vacant white bench in front of a blank white screen, on which flash a series of colors. This is An Opera for One. The exhibit is open through Oct. 30.  Gallery hours are Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.- 5 p.m., and Saturdays, 9 a.m. - 3 p.m.

Assistant art professor Kartz Ucci created the installation as a way to explore the relationship between sound and color, absence and presence. In 2004, she commissioned Canadian soprano Deanna Pauletto to sing Pablo Neruda’s book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, in the original Spanish. Pauletto improvised an a cappella melody from a ‘score’ of color and emotional cues devised by Ucci. Ucci recorded the one-time, 88-minute performance in a sixteen-story cement encased stairwell.

"In terms of how one receives the piece, I want the viewer to become the connection between the sound and the image. The work is about desire, longing and loss, thus the empty bench and the blank screen – the viewer’s presence fills this void,” Ucci said. “For the best experience of the work, review the libretto first, to read the poetry and to see the colors mapped on a grid that corresponds in time and placement to the text. The libretto is an integral part of the work.”

Ucci first attempted to translate Neruda’s poetry using a tonality established by early 20th century Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. In 2008 she hired the musician David Rosman to map Schiabin’s color code to the tonalities of Pauletto’s voice. After recording the resulting color with the sound she decided that Scriabin’s synesthetic system was not appro¬priate for Neruda’s sensual text.

Returning to the original color-coded score as her source, she reassigned color by means of her own emotional, notional and symbolic evaluation of Pauletto’s vocal interpretation of Neruda’s poetry. This expanded palette became the color sequence projected on screen and printed alongside the libretto available at the gallery. “For example, the singer's pink in the original score becomes 10 shades of pink in the installation,” she said. Each poem has between 300 and 500 selected colors.

She created a rear-projected video of the resulting color sequence to take advantage of the dimensions of the Helzer Gallery, forcing an unnatural perspective on viewers. “ It’s not an image you could experience in real life. With projected light there would be shadows, plus the camera’s point of view is skewed and slightly off-axis,” she said. “To maintain an equal balance of color , the bench and the screen were shot separately and pieced together in post production. ”

Ucci, trained in painting and sculpture, teaches time-based arts and approaches video production as a visual artist. Following a studio visit in Eugene, curators Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith, formerly of Tilt Gallery and Project Space, asked Ucci to create an installation for their mobile gallery, TILT Export. Ucci also delivered a talk at PCC and at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, about her work, which includes an audio collage of 368 songs with the word ‘sad’ in the title. Researching those songs first led her to Neruda’s poetry.

Ucci hopes the enigmatic juxtapositions of the installation capture the sense of absence and longing and of sadness and desire in Neruda’s love poems. “The poetry itself is very sensual, effusive and erotically charged - he wrote that book when he was only 17 - yet the image I present is a controlled and empty space. One has to be seduced - it’s a liminal experience.”

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Contact: Karen Johnson, AAA communications, 541-346-3603, karenjj@uoregon.edu

Source: Kartz Ucci, assistant professor, Art Dept, 541-954-9256, ucci@uoregon.edu

Links:
http://www.tiltpdx.com
http://www.kartzucci.com
http://www.art-uo.uoregon.edu
http://aaablogs.uoregon.edu/blog/2009/10/07/tilt-export-kartz-ucci/

Captions: “TILT Export: Kartz Ucci” at Helzer Gallery, Portland Community College Rock Creek.