Sound Change (2010)

Sound Change, an installation by Jeff Slomba is a series of investigations concerned with acts of selective preservation in response to the shifts occurring in our natural and built environments. The artist manipulates the scale and context of common forms such as seashells, cassette tapes, speakers, and concrete blocks only to de-familiarize them to the viewer. The large-scale horsehoe crab and conch shells overwhelm the sculpture, suggesting their extreme unnaturalness or artificiality. The artist reveals their structural arrangements as being dynamic, layered, and malleable forms whose narrative continues to trace cultural production, while the overarching narrative comments on the potential invasion of Long Island Sound by the Veined Rapa Whelk--an imported, migratory species that has changed the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay since its arrival. The ambient sounds include movements of cars and trucks along Interstate 95 as well as echoes of the Atlantic oyster drill. Slomba’s contemplative work questions the very nature of “place,” and the structures and ecologies that inform it.