Sound Response by Frank Schellace
Frank Schellace sent a composition in response to works from Song in the Bone. An unassuming set of headphones will be hanging in the show. You can find the composition inside them.
A long shout through history, 2025, graphite on paper, 50” x 38”
Growth, 2024, graphite on paper, 38” x 50”
These are two of the images Frank incorporated into his work. Every time I listen to it the layers split in a different way. Throughout this time of drawing and listening, I have been strongly reminded how much time it takes to experience something by touch or sound. To touch something completely is a dedicated journey. John Hull, a professor from Oxford who lost his sight later in life described the time it took to know sculptures through touch and always returning to them to find something new. There is an uncertainty that you have always found everything there is find, which is very different from the arrogance of sight that assumes you’ve “seen it all” in a quick swipe. Learning something from sound seems never complete. Every molecule is connected through these vibrations.
In the same way in my drawings I have little concern for proportions or genres or golden means or any human made scope that pretends to give meaning or context to a form or texture or symbol. The acknowledgement that we are unaware of most of what is living, what keeps us alive, and what life actually might be, what laws of physics keep our eyes open and thoughts forming, is part of the process of drawing from memory for me. The lost and unknown sensations sink in along the way.
Listening to Frank’s composition reminds me of this.
Also please consider the bees. Frank is an expert on bees and bee keeping and bee ecology things. Agribusiness is trucking bees around in trucks to pollinate crops because they have killed too many bees with their pesticides. This is horrifyingly destructive to the bees culture and community and purpose. This process also spreads diseases and creates intense competition for the struggling bee hives that are left. They are not here for your profit. They are here for their community and the benefit of the plants in general.
Did you know bees vote through dance? When they need to find a new hive, scouts will seek out a new home, MEASURE IT and come back to the hive to dance a description of the dimensions and location. Bees in favor of a particular site vote by imitating the dance. Once enough bees are dancing in unison, they take off together. So much intelligence is beyond our sight.
Please don’t rake up your lawns until after it’s warm enough for hibernating bees to come out. Plant delicious native flowers for them. Build bee houses. Stop spraying everything with weedkiller, even if only to not give yourself cancer.
Follow Frank’s work @studiomilksmith and @traveling.hive
