Journeys through aural imagery

Where are you right now? If you were going to make a mixed-media work of art about the space around you — and how you feel about it — what visuals would you create? What sounds would you include?

Two Seattle-based artists, Christine Wallers and Tania Kupczak, have created room-size installations that are based on their aesthetic and emotional responses to places. Waller's work, on view at Suyama Space, was created specifically for the gallery space, while Kupczak has imported her impressions of Ballard into the New Media Gallery of Jack Straw Productions.

Both works evoke ideas of music and sound, although Wallers' installation, "Sea Level," is utterly silent. Thousands of thin wires hover just above the floor, reaching from one side of a large wood frame to another, conjuring up images of a giant harpsichord.

As you move around the work, the wires catch the light, creating flat golden waves that undulate up and down across the wires. It's as if you're seeing one of those sound-measuring machines with the sound turned off.

Exhibit reviews

"Sea Level," installation by Christine Wallers, , 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, through Dec. 9, Suyama Space, 2324 Second Ave., Seattle (206-256-0809).

"Maps&Legends," installation by Tania Kupczak, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, through Dec. 30, Jack Straw Productions, 4261 Roosevelt Way N.E., Seattle (206-634-0919 or www.jackstraw.org).

In fact, Wallers has a history of creating work with sound, recently teaming up with Steve Peters to create "Alchemy," an installation full of marvelous sights and sounds at the Center on Contemporary Art. Here, she seems to have responded to the visuals of the space she was invited to fill. Her golden wires echo the strong lines of the grain of the wood-planked floor.

So much so, in fact, that when you're standing still, and the light stops playing across the surface of the wires, the work is just barely there.

Wallers states that she is interested in creating works about "emergence" and how we perceive the ephemeral. She succeeds: "Sea Level" provides a quiet, elusive experience that is hard to describe in fixed, concrete terms. It's not an installation for viewers who prefer visual abundance and symbolic clarity.

Interestingly, Wallers was on the panel of artists who selected Tania Kupczak to exhibit at Jack Straw Productions. Like Wallers, Kupczak has used spare visual means. Kupczak's installation, "Maps&Legends," looks minimal, but her use of sound is rich and layered. When entering the dark room that holds her work, Kupczak's voice and other voices and noises of urban activity come at you from different places in the room.

Half of the floor is covered with a stark-white topographical map of Ballard, with three speakers suspended above it. The speakers appear at first to be lights, a fitting impression because it is sound that illuminates the meaning of the work.

Her exploration of sound is appropriate for the space, given that Jack Straw Productions is dedicated to providing support for audio-media creations. Stopping at tiled street markers from the early 1900s in Ballard, Kupczak recorded her thoughts and the miscellaneous sounds around her, then used the Jack Straw Productions studios to remix those field recordings and to record herself reading selections from her journals.

Her journal excerpts are both quirky and poignant, covering such topics as the perfection of a Kit Kat candy bar and the dissolution of a romance.

Listening to her poetic phrases and the other bits of music and aural ephemera, you can begin to navigate personal and cultural terrain. But you will not end up with a specific, neat narrative about the artist or about Ballard. After all, Kupczak is investigating "our cultural compulsion to preserve objects whether or not we understand their histories."

Kupczak's work mimics the process of how we construct meaning out of our impressions of a place. The stepped layers and undulating forms of the map, along with the ebb and flow of sound from the different speakers, gently suggest the idea of a journey.

You might find yourself turning toward the different speakers as they are activated. As it turns out, the speakers are placed above the topographical map in the locations of those old tile street markers.

As a visitor to the installations by Waller and Kupczak, you are prompted to be very aware of how you visit, how you look and listen and move. Both artists, in differing, lyrical ways, investigate the interaction between body and place.