BYU Assistant Professor and Gallery Manager Christopher Lynn on Sound, Copper & History As Artistic Media
Christopher Lynn has been hard to spot in CFAC halls since last winter, but the associate professor took time to talk to us in the College of Fine Arts and Communications External Relations Office before his next artistic adventures during his sabbatical.
At the Bountiful Davis Art Center, Lynn recently displayed a video installation of a pile of speakers playing sounds made with the Berlin Wall. His current projects involve audio recordings, ringing rocks and painting with acid.
Q: I saw on Instagram that you are exploring sound lately and recently showed at the Bountiful Davis Art Center. Did you have sound pieces as part of the show?
Lynn: Yes. My piece, “Berlin Wall” included sound recordings from a study abroad Joe Ostraff and I conducted last summer from when we visited the Berlin Wall. There are new sections of the wall manufactured for tourists, but the original sections still remain. There is exposed rebar within sections of the concrete wall. I had some recording equipment and contact microphones and realized if I connected microphones and the rebar and hit them it made them vibrate and make tones. It created sounds and music from the Berlin Wall—virtual instruments you can play. The sounds of those wall-bells played through amplifiers at my Bountiful Davis Art Center exhibition.
Q: Do you think you will be doing more art with sound?
Lynn: It is a really fascinating wormhole.
In the process of my research, I’ve found these things called ringing rocks. There are only three spots in the world that have them, one of which is Butte, Montana. I went out to Butte last October to collect sounds, not knowing what I was going to do with them. I discovered there is a history of protest songs in a nearby copper mine. The site is now so polluted people play bird calls to prevent birds from landing there and dying.
I decided to play the songs of the protest miners using ringing rocks, and I recreated pages from the song book using my handmade copper ink. I am also creating paintings with sulfuric acid from the site; the acid will eventually erode the paintings.
Q. Do you have a musical background?
Lynn: I’m not formally trained, but I’ve always been in bands. I come from the punk side of music where passion matters more than skill. I play guitar, bass and some piano.
Q. Bells have a different overtone series than other instruments, right? How do you mix them with the kinds of instruments you play?
Lynn: It has been hard categorizing the sounds from the rocks and the Berlin Wall. It’s always kind of wonky. They sound like the kind of instruments Tom Waits would play— junkyard sort of stuff.
When I was in Germany, I was recording all sorts of stuff, sounds from postcard racks and I even recorded a snail.
Q. How long have you been exploring sound?
Lynn: Within an art context, three years. I did video pieces after graduate school and would include music by a friend who is an experimental composer. I always saw that as his work augmenting what I was doing. I started collecting and making sound a more conscious part of the process during the last three years.
I don’t know why I kept these two worlds separate before.
