The short version
- Cevdet Erek’s Americas at SculptureCenter in Long Island City brings together sound works first made for Mexico City and elsewhere.
- Its new piece mixes 1980s New York metal with recordings of works from Sound/Art, a 1984 show at the same institution.
- It is open Thursday to Monday, noon to 6 p.m., until December 28.
At SculptureCenter in Long Island City, Queens, the artist and musician Cevdet Erek has installed Americas, his first solo exhibition in New York. It gathers sound works he built for particular places, among them Measures Taken for Mexico City and Thrash softly from afar from 2019, alongside a new commission. The equipment list is short: three-channel sound, loudspeakers, amplifiers, a computer, steel and iron fencing, and sticks. The curator is Jovanna Venegas.
The new piece, Sound/Artwork, is a lesson in local history. It “mixes 1980s New York metal with audio samples of works included in Sound/Art (1984),” the SculptureCenter exhibition the institution credits with helping to establish sound art as a genre. The center describes Erek’s installations as tuned to their rooms yet “translatable, variable, and expandable, like an original track that can be bootlegged.”
Cultured this week placed the show in a crowded season of sound art, alongside the Whitney Biennial, Tarek Atoui at Tate Modern and Raven Chacon at SFMOMA. Americas is at 44–19 Purves Street, open Thursday to Monday, 12:00 to 18:00, until December 28.
