Meaning, found in a breath, a song, or a prayer, as a person or a word, in a piece of metal or in love, in a faraway star or another world, might be personal or might be shared. Meaning might be God or nothing at all, or everything. Meaning could be what is lifted up, anything revered. Perceived, found, or assigned, meaning might transcend its origins and expand, like sound waves traveling and rippling across a street and through a wall. Meaning might be lost or might mean nothing, unless it is found and spared.
In 2021, artist and sculptor Sarah E. Brook received a call from a friend that Holy Apostles Episcopal Church in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, New York, was replacing their pipe organ and getting rid of the old pipes. Brook immediately rescued hundreds of pipes from being discarded, picking them up the following day.
The pipes have now been recontextualized by Brook as a large-scale sculptural installation with an audio recording, at Sweet Lorraine Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. The audio piece immerses gallery-goers in voices and the sounds of the pipes themselves. Brook commissioned Chase Berggrun, Meg Day, Jordan Kisner, Natasha Oladokun, Spencer Reece, and Andy Šlemenda to create poems inspired by Christian and Jewish scripture, specifically psalms that each poet selected. A poem by Brook is also part of the collection. Brook wrote, “I commissioned six queer and trans writers to each create a fresh take on a psalm of their choosing. I picked these folks because of our shared interest in translating the potency of traditional religious practice into more inclusive and expansive terms. I chose the psalms as a prompt because they are deeply personal texts–first person poems that go deep into longing, struggle, fear, betrayal, redemption, awe, and love. They are also central to both Jewish and Christian scripture. These poets pulled and re-visioned this personal relationship with God into something potent and contemporary and utterly original for each of them. The works are extraordinary, and I’m so very honored by this collaboration.”
The silvery grey metal pipes, ranging in size from mere inches to more than four feet tall, are arranged with individual vertical orientation throughout the gallery space in inventive larger visually rhythmic forms, including curvilinear rows that ascend and descend from almost reaching the high ceiling to nearly sweeping the floor, while compressing and expanding in closeness to one another, along the white walls. The years of the pipes’ usage are apparent in the visible dents and surface distress, reflecting hundreds if not thousands of songs being played during their former pipe organ function at church worship services. Interspersed between the pipes throughout the installation is graphite hand-drawn serif lettering, communicating lines of text from the commissioned psalm poems. The graphite lettering’s silvery grey color and slightly imperfect surface matches the color and finish of the pipes, creating a unified visual flowing movement of lines of pipes and poems around the room. While the pipes and lettering are not actually moving, their arrangement in the context of the immersive sound is evocative of movement and waves of sounds and energy. Brook’s strong artistic intuition and experience as a sculptor shine in the impactful physically immersive and room-encompassing layout. The gestalt effect of the installation poignantly and reverentially elevates underrepresented and so often denigrated voices.
Inspired by Catholicism’s language of sacred power being transmitted through material objects to channel spiritual or heavenly-conferred virtues, Brook embraces the possibility of reaching an audience of any or no religious affiliation via sculptural installation, sound, and poetry. While the pipes clearly operate as a potent visual symbolic signification of church, and the poems are based on religious scripture, the exhibit transcends the bounds of religious specificity via its sculptural and poetic recontextualization as art, demonstrating Brook’s adeptness for expansion and inclusivity.
When Brook first brought the pipes back to their art studio, they discovered that human breath alone could sound them without requiring the organ pump at the church. Freed from apparatus, the pipes now sing songs of unassigned sounds, songs of poets, the familiar and the unknown, and songs of art and love. There is plenty of meaning to be found in “psalm” by Sarah E. Brook, and it is neither didactic nor overdetermined, but rather open to everything, everyone, every possibility, an “open wholeness love” that Brook writes about in these lines from their own poem “Psalm 27”:
This love
open wholeness love
our life, the everything life
living every, living all.
The spirit of inclusive collaboration is omnipresent in the touching commissioned poems, and in pipes available at the exhibition for gallery visitors to play sounds using their own human breath.
To hear the audio piece with the sound of the pipes and the poets’ voices included in “psalm”, please visit this link:https://m.soundcloud.com/user-907878723/2final-psalm-audio-mixdown
“psalm” by Sarah E. Brook runs through April, by appointment only. Please contact the gallery at tiartstudios@gmail.com.
Sweet Lorraine Gallery, 183 Lorraine St., Brooklyn, New York, 11231
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