Brad Eilering’s Interdisciplinary Investigations in Art

BRAD EILERING’S INTERDISCIPLINARY INVESTIGATIONS IN ART

By Janet Riehl

Brad Eilering’s recent project of sculptural music-making was born of an expanding architectural career in which academic rigor, professional development and brave curiosity result in experimentation. Janet Riehl drew Eilering into a discussion around his Architecture Meets Sculpture exhibition at Jacoby Arts Center in the fall of 2018.

Janet Riehl: Let’s start with your four harmonic sculptures because they bring in many of the strands of your practice: music, architecture and sculpture.

Brad Eilering: I’ve come to realize just how instrumental music (ha!) was as I was growing up. Music was a common ground in my parents’ home, part of their socialization, a tool for raising a family. It was mainly recorded music, with live music on occasion. My father was an architect and my mother was a fiber artist, but music was a common chord (ha!!) that brought the family together. My mom was a member of the Columbia House Record Company and we would listen to each new album while playing checkers or Clue.

JR: How did you come to make these harmonic sculptures?

BE: When I started teaching design, after I had completed my graduate studies in architecture, I was attending lectures and talking to professors about the language associated with design, and this music professor came into the conversation and said, “That’s the same language that I use in music.” We discovered this crossover with rhythm and chord and harmony with emphasis on creating a line., even a sharp versus a flat in explaining a value. So, I don’t think it was an original idea for me to create sculptures that have a harmonic quality. It was a natural progression of this thinking.

JR: Okay, so, you came from a family where there is a surround sound. And then you’re moving into your design training and you come to this realization about the interplay between the design and the music underpinning.

BE: You could say that I had to be hit in the head, or that it had to become obvious to me that there was a musical direction for me to proceed. While I was creating Maker — welding, fabricating and grinding, beautiful sounds were coming off of it. It was speaking to me. The long bars attached to a plate changed completely once it was set to vibration and the vibration created music, or at least sound.

JR: So you could do it very intentionally at that point. You could say, “This was a lucky happenstance, but now let me see if I can work to make this happen.”

BE: Yes, that’s true. But also, being skilled at problem solving and accepting the question of how to improve the quality of sound as a means of advancing the interactive quality of the work. I accepted this sculpture as an instrument, advanced the research though involving others, especially musicians, and considered the musical relationship to the form.

I saw that there was something magical happening and thought, “I’m going to advance this idea through experimentation with the lengths of bar to see if I can achieve different tones, and then develop improved sound quality through reverberation.” This led to developing a body of works each with a hollow base which functioned as a resonating chamber and a reflecting board under it. Environmental influences are present. It sounds different based on what it’s sitting on: wood floor or concrete floor.

JR: Have you thought to record this music? Or have you?

BE: A couple musicians have provided some input and last weekend I talked with a composer. Essentially, what we are looking at is an unrefined musical instrument, a raw idea, a type of an instrument that is presented as a sculpture. For now, this opportunity is open to any viewers who interacts with the piece. I am intrigued by the range of sound produced by those with and without musical experience.

Architecture Meets Sculpture Exhibition Opening, Brad Eilering at left (photo credit: Dennis Dvoracek)

Brad Eilering, Harmonic Three, (photo credit: Dennis Dvoracek)

The music is a natural outcrop of my interest in breaking with tradition and moving into a contemporary realm of the art-viewing experience. I have always been interested in taking my sculptures off of the pedestal and thus allowing them to engage in the space, pushing, pulling and expanding, creating a relationship with the surrounding architecture and with the viewer.

As a contemporary viewing experience, the harmonic quality becomes a way of improving interaction and I’ve been wonderfully happy with the resulting viewer engagement. When a person comes up to the sculptures and begins to play it as an instrument, they often become self-absorbed even forgetting they are in a public place. And that is amazing.

JR: So, what you are really after is an interactive experience?

BE: What I’m after is a way to consider my work that is justified and makes perfect sense with all that has gone into it. I was trained both as a traditional sculptor and also as a contemporary sculptor, creating installation works and even large-scale public sculpture. In terms of how I measure success in sculptural terms — it is space, it is light and it is form — how those three come together creates the value of the piece. In terms of classifying or being able to talk about my work, it simply doesn’t feel right using traditional terms. I consider the works to be sculptural installations relating to expanded media.

JR: And of course there are references you’ve researched and those form your community.

BE: Yes, there are many established precedents [for my practice] and just the simple act of moving sculpture off of the pedestal establishes a new game. Now it becomes more like architecture.

Jacoby Art Gallery (photo credit: Dennis Dvoracek)

www.jacobyartscenter.org www.bradeilering.com

ARTIST INTERVIEWSSPRING 2019 ALLTHEARTSTL.COM