Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be creating a sound installation for the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY this summer as the fifth iteration of the Museum’s “Elevator Music” series.

My installation, Rapture/Rupture, will open June 25 along with a new show featuring Michael Oatman, and “Weapons of Mass Dissemination,” a show of WWI and WWII propaganda posters. The work will incorporate “Russia,” a shape note music tune written in 1786 by Daniel Read, and the first song I led at a Sacred Harp singing convention.

Recordings of two shape note music compositions of mine, “North Adams” and “Undergone” will feature in a sound installation I’m creating to accompany The Informants, a work by Carrie Dashow in her collaborative solo show with Jesse Bercowetz and Matt Bua at Jessica Murray Projects in New York City, Pent-Up and Under Gone.

Working with Albany-area shape note singers, I’m creating recordings of the two tunes for five speakers, with each speaker playing back the voice of one singer. Each speaker is paired with an “informant” a character of sorts in the form of a video sculpture, created by Carrie. The work is juxtaposed with a giant lighthouse sculpture built by Matt and Jesse, and a video depicting the “eye” of the lighthouse by Carrie. Carrie also wrote the texts to “Undergone” and “North Adams.”

Pent-Up and Under Gone opens on May 27.

Two new works of mine, Shade and Lawrence are featured this afternoon in MaFiA Show at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

Lawrence mixes diary, tunebook, and recorded spoken word, creating a new home for journal entries removed from Jesse’s personal website.

Shade is a five-channel sound installation expressing Jesse’s relationship to a shape note music song written 200 years ago — “Evening Shade” by Stephen Jenks.