Echo Scholarship – Seth Sher
SETH SHER
– Echo Scholarship Auction –
Temporal Catacomb, 2012
Archival Inkjet Print
24 x 16″
Estimated Value: $500
Seth’s Echo Scholarship is intended to support a female musician or sound artist.
Chicago-based musician and artist Seth Sher powerfully combines music and visual art to deepen the connections for those who encounter his work. Existing simultaneously both physically and aurally, Seth’s art is a “purposeful corruption of audiences’ cognition” that continuously employs “more subtle complexities to manipulate how elements are perceived.”
Seth never really decided to become an artist – it “just kind of happened.” After entering the experimental music scene and teaching himself to play the drums, he immediately realized that rhythm was his passion. He powerfully contends, “I am drawn to music because it breathes life outside of its physical manifestations.” Seth’s early musical tastes – such as his use of polyrhythms and repetition – set the tone for his practice as he knows it today: “The best way to experience sound or music is to close your eyes and imagine yourself within the spectrum of the soundwaves themselves, hearing where each sound exists within the frequency space.”
Collaborations with ACRE, however, prompted a major evolution in Seth’s artistic practice. It was during his second and latest residency where he “embraced more of the social part of residency life, trading ideas with many brilliant and thought-provoking artists.” Not coincidentally, this was also the first time Seth truly incorporated a visual facet to his practice and explored ways to translate his ideas existing in sound and music into the visual medium. (Representing his first foray into photography, it’s quite fitting that Seth offer up Temporal Catacomb for auction.)
ACRE remains quintessentially important to Seth. The organization’s encouragement has “inspired [him] to work outside of [his] comfort zone and embrace new processes and ideas.” And by introducing him to a community of forward-thinkers and providing him with his initial opportunities to display his visual work, both ACRE and its cohorts have left a lasting impression on Seth’s artistic philosophy and practice.
Taylor Peterson