Jesse
Stewart: Wheels of Time
September 7 to December 14, 2003
The opening
reception was on Sunday, September 7 with
a Performance featuring Jesse Stewart on percussion and Montreal
turntable pioneer and improviser extraordinaire Martin Tétreault
For the Guelph
Jazz Festival, the
Macdonald Stewart Art Centre presented Guelph percussionist,
composer, and visual artist Jesse Stewart in his first solo exhibition at a
public art gallery. Stewart
combines the rhythmic complexity of etched vinyl, the ritualized concentric
circles of Buddhist epistemology, and the instrumental beat juggling techniques
of turntablism in an aesthetic meditation on the worlds of image and sound.
Wheels of Time was an interactive exhibition that opened with a
performance by Stewart, a concert that also marked the finale of the Guelph Jazz
Festival.
Wheels of
Time was comprised of twelve record players
arranged in a circle on the floor of the gallery.
The turntables played vinyl records that Stewart found in thrift store
LP bargain bins and etched by hand with patterns of squares.
When played, the records produced polyrhythmic beat patterns of
increasingly complex rhythms.
In the
exhibition Wheels of Time, Stewart fused the hip hop genre of turntablism
(twin turntables are commonly called the wheels of steel) with the mandalas (the
Sanskit word for circle) of Tibetan Buddhism.
The Kalachakra – the ‘wheel of time’ sand mandala – is of
particular interest to Stewart. Gallery
visitors were invited to play Stewart’s vinyl records to create a sonic mandala
– a meditative place for centering one’s awareness.
At age 18,
Jesse Stewart was named ‘Young Musician of the Year’ (Jazz Report magazine)
and ‘Outstanding Young Canadian Musician’ (International Association of Jazz
Educators). Now 28, Stewart is an
award-winning musician, a master’s graduate in musicology and music
composition, and a doctoral candidate in the School of English and Theatre
Studies, a joint PhD programme offered through the University of Guelph and
Wilfred Laurier University. In
2002, Stewart was awarded the inaugural Brock Doctoral Scholarship, Guelph’s
most prestigious graduate award. In the
summer of 2003, he toured the major jazz festival circuit across Canada.
The exhibition Wheels of Time and the catalogue containing essays by Jesse Stewart and Exhibition Coordinator Dawn Owen were supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.