André Piguet at Gertrude Glasshouse

Artist: André Piguet

Exhibition title: kemp roth comb filter

Venue: Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne, Australia

Date: February 8 – March 10, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Gertrude Glasshouse

A series of paradoxes arises when parsing Piguet’s Lilliputian iron maidens (or are they speaker box snares, or cached acoustic traps?). The nature of these teleologically amorphous objects encourages something similar to the process of chemical distillation to take place in the interpretive moment – we instinctively want to reverse engineer them from the sum of their parts.

Nevertheless, we are viscerally refused entry to the interiors we encounter, their punitive environments challenging any outward appearance of stability or productivity suggested by isometric construction. Resembling models used to inform belligerent object design or misanthropic town planning, these structures recall a futuristic architecture serving some vaguely discomfiting, latent pursuit.

Whilst the seemingly randomised arrangement and decoration may invite a symbolist interpretation of such an extensively codified environment, this cellular matrix instead prioritises a decoupling of established objective territories. With this, the artist’s longue durée project of translating emergent and imaginary spaces into a composition of diverse, often opposing registers is exposed: for example, expressive contra repressive, or, as he describes it, ‘spiky versus fluﬀy’.

Piguet’s exhibition history to date can be interpreted as a product of this motivation, resulting in a consciously decentralised practice that incorporates bodies of painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and metallurgy. Distributing spatial enquiries across a variety of mediums means a configurable set of parameters is consistently in play, whilst allowing free associative image spaces to manifest. The seemingly infinite number of processes that could be applied to convert raw data into information comes to mind here, and within this framework Justin Clemens and Adam Nash’s examination of modulation in new media provides a fruitful entry point to examining the variation of registers within Piguet’s practice at large.

Clemens and Nash write, citing Deleuze’s essay on control societies:

““…controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.” This is a suggestive, if basically metaphorical use of the term. What modulation means in music is simply to change key, whereas in telecommunications and electronics, it means to cause the qualities of one signal to vary in accordance with another signal to enable its transmission”.

An amalgamation of these two definitions can be observed. Yet whilst the former, musical analogy of changing key to enact contrast within a composition is a relatively self contained parallel to draw alongside Piguet’s modus operandi, the latter notion of a quasi-symbiosis in electronic media introduces a margin of complexity that enhances its transformative potential. As a phenomenon extending beyond the modulation initiated by Deleuze’s sieve, a comb filter causes constructive and destructive interference by adding a delayed version of a signal to itself. It forms peaks and troughs in frequency response (thus giving the appearance of a comb), and is caused when signals that are identical have their phase diﬀerences summed. Varying the time delay makes the comb filter sweep through its frequency range, picking out diﬀerent harmonics as it moves.

Transmitted through this auditory device, the physical and emotional registers Piguet crafts emerge as similarly functioning vertices and furrows. They too belong to a feedback loop where individual components are permeated and enriched through cumulative resonances. Guided by a morphable set of controls designed to enhance their articulation, cadences and dissonances arise almost organically from a process of layering, delay and reprisal, with the raw data of emergent spaces and their display registers materialising as an exponentially expanding terrain.

-Deirdre Cannon

André Piguet, kemp roth comb filter, 2018, exhibition view, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne

André Piguet, k.r. comb filter 1, 2018, PLA plastic, coloured pencil, acrylic, mixed media on paper, glass orb,, polyester felt, 24 x 8 x 20cm

André Piguet, kemp roth comb filter, 2018, exhibition view, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne

André Piguet, k.r. comb filter 2, 2018, PLA plastic, coloured pencil, acrylic, mixed media on paper, 24 x 8 x 20cm

André Piguet, kemp roth comb filter, 2018, exhibition view, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne

André Piguet, k.r. comb filter 3, 2018, PLA plastic, coloured pencil, acrylic, mixed media on paper, 32 x 8 x 20cm

André Piguet, kemp roth comb filter, 2018, exhibition view, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne

André Piguet, k.r. comb filter 4, 2018, PLA plastic, coloured pencil, acrylic, glass orb, aluminium tape, lighting gel swatches, mixed media on paper, 32 x 8 x 20cm

André Piguet, kemp roth comb filter, 2018, exhibition view, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne

André Piguet, k.r. comb filter 5 & 6, 2018, PLA plastic, coloured pencil, acrylic, glass orb, aluminium tape, lighting gel swatches, mixed media on paper, polyester felt, 32 x 8 x 20cm / 24 x 8 x 20cm

André Piguet, k.r. comb filter 6, 2018, PLA plastic, coloured pencil, acrylic, mixed media on paper, polyester felt, 24 x 8 x 20cm

André Piguet, kemp roth comb filter, 2018, exhibition view, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne

André Piguet, k.r. comb filter 7, 2018, PLA plastic, coloured pencil, acrylic, mixed media on paper, glass orbs, 24 x 8 x 20cm

André Piguet, kemp roth comb filter, 2018, exhibition view, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne

André Piguet, k.r. comb filter 8, 2018, PLA plastic, coloured pencil, acrylic, mixed media on paper, glass orb, 24 x 8 x 20cm

André Piguet, kemp roth comb filter, 2018, exhibition view, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne