JON MUELLER + TOM LECKY: ALL COLORS PRESENT
A sound and visual meditation

Jon Mueller

’s singular performance idiom is an awe-inspiring display of elegant athleticism, preternatural focus, brute restraint, and ecstatic, monastic reverie. Paired with Tom Lecky’s photographs, it becomes a deliberate focus on form, shape and detail. It requires and demands a state of inner quietude from witnesses. Yet, from this seemingly metronomic exercise blossoms every possible tint and hue of infinite spectral sound.

Renowned percussionist and drummer Jon Mueller is celebrated for his uncommon technique, rigor and virtuosity. Mueller’s aim has been to move drums, percussion and rhythm from its anticipated backbeat to a central musical focus, something more intuitive and natural than usually imagined. Audiences throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United Kingdom have experienced this idiosyncratic point of view as, paradoxically, both ‘cathartic’ and ‘meditative’. Notable solo performances have taken place at the Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, Issue Project Room, SXSW, Big Ears Festival, Hopscotch Fest, and Witching Hour Festival. Beyond his solo work, Mueller has performed and recorded with Olivia Block, Aaron Turner, James Plotkin, Who is the Witness?, Mind Over Mirrors, Volcano Choir, Collections of Colonies of Bees and Pele. www.rhythmplex.com IG: @jonmueller

Tom Lecky has worked in photography, music (as Hallock Hill), the book arts, prose and poetry writing, and literary criticism. His creative work concentrates on memory, place, and environment, the work of the imagination, perception, and the intersections of abstraction and representation. He often interweaves appropriated texts and images with his own, evoking a conversation with the history of book design and illustration.

These creative pursuits are linked to Tom’s career as an internationally recognized expert in the field of rare and antiquarian books and manuscripts. He has worked in the auction world – notably in a 17-year run as a specialist and Head of Christie’s New York Books and Manuscripts Department – and as an advisor to collectors and institutions.He is the owner of Riverrun Books, and the founder of the rare book and manuscript appraisal and advisory firm Lecky Art Group. www.tomlecky.com

IG: @tom.lecky

Whitney Johnson is an artist living in Chicago. She composes, performs, and installs multi-channel sound with viola, sine waves, Max/MSP, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording. As artist-in-residence at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and Inkonst in Malmö, Sweden, her latest LP, Hav (2024, Drag City), composed sine waves, marimba, viola, ARP Odyssey synthesizer, and Halldorophone into a multi-channel performance-installation. As Matchess, the Stena cassette (2024, Drag City) embodies an alter ego to join the cult of Hermaphroditus in Cypriot and Greek antiquity. Recent performance-installations FIAT (2023, Forecast Platform Berlin), The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Huizkol (2020, Lampo), and Fundamental 256 Hz (2019, Longform Editions) consider the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique using binaural beats to induce relaxed or energized mental states. In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018 and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University in Sweden in 2022. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art and Technology/Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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