Shaping Sound, Tracing Light: Bart Hopkin + Joshua Moreno

How does an idea become audible? How does light become tangible? Shaping Sound, Tracing Light: Bart Hopkin + Joshua Moreno offers an immersive encounter with light, sound, form, and color through the work of two distinctive Bay Area artists. Comprising one-of-a-kind interactive musical instruments alongside tracings of sunlight rays that transform over time on the gallery walls, these works reveal unique physical processes through which the ineffable becomes perceptible.

A composer and instrument inventor whose work reverberates within the long and storied tradition of Bay Area experimental music and sound art, Bart Hopkin gives playable form to ideas through the construction and use of his sculptural musical instruments. An artist and educator who often uses site-specific mark-making to document overlooked environmental phenomena, Joshua Moreno turns light to form as he tracks the shifting course of the sun—and the objects that obstruct and reflect its rays—within the gallery over days, weeks, and months.

Hopkin brings sound from nothingness into an audible field. Moreno coaxes light into the physical plane, revealing shadows in the process. During reception events, these actions will be performed live by the two artists. And throughout the duration of the exhibition, visitors are invited to experience and participate in this synesthetic interplay that is by turns subtle and dramatic, harmonious and dissonant, ethereal and substantial.