A Lab for Listening, Visualizing Sound, and Collective Resonance at Fall River MoCA

“[See] [Saw] [Sound] [Wave]” at the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art is an inventive curatorial offering regarding aesthetics, the archive, the generational transference of knowledge, and collaborative performance. It invites questions such as, what happens if the gallery becomes a lab for listening? What will come of sharing art made with and for artists’ mentors? In the context of the archive, how do we distinguish nostalgia from critically rigorous work, and does the difference matter? How can aesthetics and philosophical art-making, which are typically created and shared in rarefied spaces, be truly socially engaged? The visionary co-founders of FR MoCA, Brittni Ann Harvey and Harry Gould Harvey IV, have created a space that invites the community to be receptive to experimentation and not only tolerant of, but content to sit with the open-endedness of questions like those listed above. 

The title’s rhythmic harmony forms a whimsical guide. “See saw,” otherwise a familiar fixture of childhood playgrounds, has a familiar lilting cadence indicative of play. “Sound wave” describes how sound occurs and travels, forming series of arcs not visible to the eye. Paradox is afoot throughout the show, as “[See] [Saw] [Sound] [Wave]” seeks to visualize sound, and it also leans into the idea that sound transcends all boundaries, and perhaps most remarkably, time. 

The white-cube minimalism of the gallery maintains the focus on the sense of sound. It features work by Erik DeLuca, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Aviva Silverman, and Laurie Spiegel. Silverman and DeLuca are contemporaries who work in multiple media and have socially engaged practices, at times in conversation or collaboration with elders. The late Lucier and Oliveros as well as Spiegel are pioneering composers born in the first half of the twentieth century. 

Listening stations with work by Lucier, Oliveros, and Spiegel line the longest wall, a direct and accessible application of the archive. Oliveros’s most active period of writing, the 1960s to 1970s, was similar to now, with political unrest prompting many to want to withdraw from public life, whether for safety or from feelings of profound discouragement. Oliveros composed music such as Deep Listening, which has a healing effect and encourages communal listening. In this spirit, FR MoCA offers a shared musical experience on June 21 in the form of a listening party for Affliction of a Crow, a premiere project from KZ, a producer, sound worker, and sonic archivist raised at FR MoCA. 

Grand, twelve-foot tall whisper mirrors form the shape of domes on opposite ends of the largest gallery so that everyone between the mirrors has the potential to activate the refraction of sounds therein. Like much of the works on view, the sound mirrors refer to previous iterations. The day the exhibition opened, Harvey IV described the exhibition design and the philosophy in a social media post: “We are using historical military acoustic defense structures as soft power, transforming them into civic instruments of attention and collective resonance.” Harvey IV and collaborators created the whisper mirrors from the same material as museum pedestals, offering an architectural way to enliven or transform often-mute tools of display. The sound mirrors reflect sound and amplify it based on how each subject moves.

I was fortunate to visit on opening night, when DeLuca and his collaborators, Qais Assali and Enongo A. Lumumba-Kasongo (also known as the Vespers Band), were in mid-performance of Lucier’s Vespers, composed in 1967. The museum’s storefront windows face the street, and I peered in to see people lining the walls, three rows deep. With no physical art to gaze at, the guests, myself included, were more likely to notice each other. This raises the consideration of intersubjectivity, a reminder that music is first and foremost a shared experience that can feel vulnerable and revelatory. The audience heard a series of clicks emanating from each performer’s sonic dolphin (Sondal) devices as they gradually, over twenty minutes, found each other. 

DeLuca and Lucier performed Vespers together in the past, including at Marfa Sounding in Texas in 2016. Sondals were developed in Arlington, Massachusetts, to facilitate the communication of humans with dolphins. A typed 2017 letter from Lucier to DeLuca, on view in the exhibition, inquires about whether DeLuca might one day perform Vespers with dolphins.

Later, I watched the documentation of the Vespers performance for a clearer idea of what occurred. The space was standing room only, with people remaining silent and observant for the entire performance. Babies and toddlers took cues from their parents to match the calm, curious, and receptive mood. The reverent way DeLuca held the Sondal and lightly guided his collaborators while they performed made this experience as ethereal as it was experimental. 

In the second gallery, Silverman’s work is suffused with play while engaging with themes of spirituality and surveillance. Toy train tracks are a recurrent part of their art-making, which includes installations, a sound-responsive LED system, video monitors, and prints. Their Voice from the Whirlwind print series uses diagrammatic language, appearing like airplane hangars, highways, and architecture seen from the sky. Train tracks frame the compositions, like vignettes, and imply the potential for movement. Hosts of ants that are about three times larger than actual scale crawl over the tracks and other linear forms, adding an additional layer that intersects the organic with the technical. 

The rectangular format, heavy-metal framing, and insinuation of motion in Silverman’s prints recall David Smith’s welded steel drawings in space. Smith’s Hudson River Landscape (1951) was made with found steel fragments composed to synthesize several drawings he made while riding trains. A reference book with diagrams relating to the imagery lies open on a shelf below one of Silverman’s prints, sharing inspiration and enhancing the activation of the archival gesture throughout the exhibition. 

Silverman’s Path of Resplendent Intelligence (2025) has a surface of colorful acoustic dampening textile panels. Four Roman numerals arranged in each quadrant of the collage to refer to a clock, but all of the other lines made by miniature train tracks are neither linear nor radial. They curve like plans well-laid, visualizing intentions to measure that branched off into more intriguing directions.  

A throughline of “[See] [Saw] [Sound] [Wave]” implies there are many ways to hear and compose sound. This radical and nourishing exhibition reminds guests that to listen is to connect, and to witness. 

“[See] [Saw] [Sound] [Wave]” is on view at the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art through July 18, 2025.