Jonathan Mason: a music composition for six colors and a glockenspiel to be performed by one to seven strangers.
July 12 – July 24, 2016
@ Present Box

For his Present Box exhibition, artist and musician Jonathan Mason converted BMoCA’s gift shop into an interactive music composition and installation. Providing visitors with a set of simple instructions that can be performed individually or in small groups, Mason invited us to participate in playful expressions of sound.

A series of six boxes, each a different color of the spectrum — red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, and violet — are arranged on shelves around the space. A button on the top of each box welcomed visitors to play. Once pressed, 30 seconds of sound will fill the air. A rainbow of cords connects each box to a central sound system. The boxes become instruments of pre-recorded music, each with a different part of an original composition written and recorded by Mason.

The installation closely relates to the color theory presented by the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky in the early twentieth century. Kandinsky believed that music and color are interwoven, to the extent that a synesthesia, a “joined perception,” takes place when experiencing one or the other. For Kandinsky, each color had the power to elicit a note or tone, and together, color, line, shape, and texture could create a musical visual experience targeted at human emotion. In the center of Mason’s installation, a music stand with colorful sheets of music are left for visitors to fill in. He encourages participants to draw from the symphony of color in the Present Box space and the elicited feelings of passion, happiness, serenity, power, and perhaps, romance, to create musical or visual arrangements using sheet music, his invented instruments, or the glockenspiel.

Sponsors: Lovedy Barbatelli, Ann Bateson & Frank Everts, Felicia Furman, Joan & Steven Markowitz, Gabrielle & Brad Schuller, Michael & Carlyn Smith