Rodney Graham, School of Velocity and Parsifal notebook sketch, 1995.
Rodney Graham’s 1995 Renaissance Society exhibition featured two time-based musical installations, School of Velocity (1993) and Parsifal (1990). The former combined the piano exercise of the same name with Galileo’s equation of the acceleration of falling objects to create a piano piece that grows progressively slower. Based on a few bars of music from Wagner’s composition of the same name, the latter work is an opera that doesn’t end until the year 38,969,364,735.
At a lecture here in Chicago during the exhibition, Graham made a series of five sketches to represent the mathematical processes that determined the two works. For EXPO CHICAGO 2016 (September 22-25), the Renaissance Society displays these original works on paper alongside a selection of archival materials relating to the exhibition. Two of the sketches were included in our 2015 Centennial archive presentation, Let Us Celebrate While Youth Lingers and Ideas Flow.
These five framed works are available for purchase, with all proceeds benefitting the Renaissance Society. For more information, please contact Julia DeRose, Development Assistant, by email or at 773 795 2397.
