S(o)UND
San Jose University School of Art
1998

I am fascinated with the way physicality implies sound; through the calligraphy of form, the sound our mind makes when it perceives form, or the sound silence would make if our ears could hear it. It brings up the question of listening, what that has to do with making work, and the fact that hearing sculpture and hearing thought is a function of the imagination. I’m wondering if color and shape is sound, if thought makes a sound, if thought is sculpture, if sounds leave traces; footprints, in the way words are written, if sculpture speaks, if everything we come in contact with is music, if objects are an alphabet, if the implicate relationship between physicality, perception and sound is too subtle to elucidate and it is still imperative to call it out no matter how clumsily. It is very difficult to imply sound through the silence of materials, maybe impossible. There’s something diaphanous and elusive to try to grasp at such liminality and metaphysics , but I am in love with the labyrinth of how all these ideas weave together into a kind of music, and it is what I think about.

©Sono Osato

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