In her first solo exhibition, Material Sounding: The Dimensionality of A Thread,  Nneka Kai inserts her work into the realms of abstraction and performance, situates her practice within the discourses of Black feminist studies and craft. Through an in-depth study of  improvisational music, Kai has developed a unique lexicon of aural patterns that are then translated into visual compositions. Sounds manifest in the form of these soundscores, each of them as diverse as the musical traditions form which they are derived. 

Works from this aforementioned series are combined with unnamed “portals”, structures that allude to String Theory’s notion of everything in the universe being made up of vibrating strings. These portals serve as gateways—collapsing linear time, complicating conventional perceptions of space, warping viewers to a different plane. The reverberation of the strings speaks to the thought everything makes a sound whether audible or not. These portals give sound structure and, in turn, lend an opacity to what normally goes unseen. 

Material Exhibitions (Chicago, IL)
June 23 - August 25, 2019

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