Multicentered and Reverberating

Sonya Bogdanova – Kacie Lees – Melissa McClung – Susan Pasowicz – John Phelan – Carol Peyes – Tim Stone – Kevin Stuart – Amy Vogel

In the late 1970s, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan posited two types of sensory-cultural paradigms: visual and acoustic space. According to McLuhan, we in the industrialized West live in visual space. We transitioned to this during the time of the Greeks, and it was reinforced during the Renaissance. He writes that, since, “Western civilization has been mesmerized by a picture of the universe as a limited container in which all things are arranged according to the vanishing point, in linear geometric order.”

He continues, “Such is the power of Euclidian or visual space that we can’t live with a circle unless we square it.”

Acoustic space, he contends, existed for hundreds of thousands of years prior (and still outlives the Greeks in certain cultures). “The world was multicentered and reverberating,” he writes. “It was gyroscopic. Life was like being inside a sphere, 360 degrees without margins; swimming underwater; or balancing on a bicycle.” Acoustic space does not represent things “one-at-a-time” with the “uniform ethos of the alphabet.” Rather, it “comes to us from above, below, and the sides.”

This is not merely a morphological concept. McLuhan implies that whichever paradigm a culture accepts determines in large part that society’s “perception of sanity.” Optical, linear logic tends towards hierarchy, exclusion, and—McLuhan ventures—even violence: “something is either in that space or not.” I think this determination is political in an age of division and persecution.

So this exhibition is a thought experiment: is visual art doomed to visual space? Can visual artists escape the vanishing point and capture the multicentered and reverberating, non-hierarchical aspects of acoustic space?

GUEST CURATOR:
Danny Floyd is an artist, researcher, curator, and educator based in Chicago. He holds a BFA in Photography from RISD, an MA in Visual & Critical Studies, and an MFA in Sculpture, both from SAIC. He is an Assistant Professor, Adjunct of Visual & Critical Studies, and the Undergraduate Division at SAIC. He also served as the Exhibitions Director for ACRE. Since 2013, he has been an active part of Chicago’s artist-run space community through two programs, Ballroom Projects and Adler & Floyd. He has held curatorial residencies with ACRE and Chicago Artists Coalition. He was also awarded the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation Curatorial Fellowship in 2017. He has attended studio residencies at ACRE; AS220 in Providence, RI; Earthbound Moon in Eugene, OR; The Residency Project in Pasadena, CA; and The Roger Brown House in New Buffalo, MI. He began his teaching career in 2010 at a self-proclaimed “postmodern art camp” in Western Massachusetts for children aged 11 to 16 whose freewheeling ethos of interdisciplinary experimentation still informs his teaching and art-making.

Opening Reception
Friday, January 23rd
5-8pm

On view through Febuary 27th, 2026

Official Website

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Tags: Amy Vogel, Carol Peyes, Chicago, Circle Contemporary, Danny FLOYD, John Phelan, Kacie Lees, Kevin Stuart, Melissa McClung, Multicentered and Reverberating, Sonya Bogdanova, Susan Pasowicz, Tim Stone, West Town