Painter Donna Isham builds gestures, marks, accumulations, formations, and endless layers of oil stick, graphite, charcoal, and acrylic into grounded pictorial spaces for her abstract figures to occupy, and an expansive field where mellifluous and post-cubist expressions of their psyches can bloom. Increasingly curious as to how to push the experience of painting into further multisensory, experiential terrains without losing its heartfelt and handmade texture, she became intrigued by the powers of projection-mapping video.
Of course, with any work of video art, music and sound are indispensable. As Isham’s Alchemy Immersive Collection took shape, it became inevitable that she would need a musician to work with. Enter Mark Isham—the Emmy- and Grammy-winning, Oscar-nominated composer whose celebrated career includes scores for Crash and A River Runs Through It, as well as performances alongside Bruce Springsteen, Jerry Garcia, and Joni Mitchell—and who also happens to be Donna’s husband.
As the enhanced video elements obscure, highlight, and translate patterns, imagery, gestures, and shapes from within the paintings into light and motion, Mark’s scores build a parallel acoustic architecture using piano, strings, and vintage synthesizers. The music lends a jazzy, romantic and roaming, open-ended and picaresque sway, matching and counterbalancing the art’s pacing and shifting density in a continuous cycle Donna calls Samsara—embodying “transformation as an ongoing process in which connection can still be found within darkness. A human voice calls out into the void, answered by a haunting melody…creating an atmospheric soundscape in which color, texture, and sound unfold together.”
For Mark’s part, he says, “I approach Donna’s paintings almost as I would another musician: I listen for what is already there. The color, gesture, and emotional tension all suggest a rhythm and a tonal language. My role is not to score the painting in a traditional cinematic sense, but to create music that enters into a dialogue with it. When the elements come together, the music changes how you experience the painting—and the painting changes how you hear the music.”
Donna Isham: Transformation and Beauty is on view October 2–December 20 at Nashville’s Soulios Gallery—a program showing artists whose work “bridges disciplines and invites new ways of experiencing contemporary art.” So that works out perfectly.
