Jeff Kolar: Rock Speaker Garden

September 4, 2023 9:00 am - September 15, 2023 9:00 pm The Tank

Rock Speaker Garden is a multi-channel audio installation created for outdoor rock speakers. For this site-responsive work, Kolar composed original music for playback on a collection of speakers that resemble various types of natural rock inside the Chicago Athletic Association’s historic 3,780 square-foot mosaic tile and marble swimming pool.

Jeff Kolar is an independent sound and media artist, composer, and curator. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform established in 2010. His work, described as “speaker-shredding” (Half Letter Press), “wonderfully strange” (John Corbett), and “characteristically curious” (Marc Weidenbaum), activates sound in unconventional, temporary, and ephemeral ways using appropriation and remix as a critical practice. His solo and collaborative projects, installations, and public performances often investigate the mundane sonic nuances of everyday electronic devices.

He has performed and exhibited widely across the United States, and at international venues and festivals such as the Smithsonian Institution, the New Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Moogfest, The Kitchen, CTM Festival forAdventurous Music (Germany), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kino Šiška (Slovenia), ORF Radio Kulturhaus (Austria), Radio Revolten International Radio Art Festival (Germany), LAK Festival of Nordic Sound Art (Denmark), among others. His work has been reviewed and discussed in international print publications and online platforms such as The New York Times, The Wire Magazine, Red Bull Music Academy and Architect Magazine, and in an array of art, design and music publications including VICE, Art Slant, designboom, and Rhizome.org.

Photographs by Olivia Wolf.