Kevin Beasley’s Acoustic Mirror Reflects Sounds of the Seasons

Word of mouth stands to take palpable form this season at the Storm King Art Center, when the idyllic upstate New York sculpture park plays home to an acoustic mirror created by the sculptor and sound artist Kevin Beasley. Measuring 11 feet tall and 100 feet wide, the four-part work was inspired by World War I–era defense structures that, in curved and reflective fashion, amplified distant sounds and dispersed sonic signals of encroaching enemies. 

Two such structures—one still in standing in Kent, England, the other on the coast of Malta—were models for the artwork, which will surveil a newly designated plot of parkland (over what used to be a parking lot) when Storm King reopens on May 7. The older acoustic mirrors were made of concrete and turned obsolete not long after their construction—when, as Steve Goodman wrote in his 2012 book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, “operation problems due to noise from the sea, wind, local towns, and ship propellers rendered the structures onto the sad scrap heap of twentieth-century dead media.”

While the concrete acoustic mirrors now exist as ghostly relics, the new one by Beasley—which will magnify visitors’ voices and the sounds of the outdoors during its run through the fall—is populated and embodied by a very different material: recycled clothes cast in resin and molded into a sort of memorial for humanity and the land it inhabits.

For Beasley, land is a living subject to be appreciated but also scrutinized. “When I look at a field, it’s not trauma-inducing, but there’s a cultural and historical context that shrouds the experience, and I’m trying to think about what that really means,” the artist said. “I don’t want to make assumptions or take things for granted, but I also don’t want to skirt the issue that, when thinking about landscape, you’re talking about colonialism, Manifest Destiny, even what’s happening now in Gaza—the idea of land being a contested site for belonging. Peoples’ right to live and exist is tied to land, and it’s hard to remove the struggles around who has a claim to land and who is a steward.”

The Storm King project relates to past works by Beasley’s that were inspired by his roots in rural Virginia, where strong family ties but also specters of racism and slavery remain. But the Storm King work also engages the specifics of its setting in the cradle of the Hudson River School of painters who, in the 19th century, imagined a sort of American Eden seeded by Manifest Destiny and hubristic notions of conquest. “It’s a very white occupation to be able to depict the landscape in the way that it was depicted,” Beasley said of storied painters including Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and others. “As an artist, it’s not hard to find refuge in terms of the skillset and the exploration and curiosity in the images that the Hudson River School painters made. But there’s another conversation that is often left out.”

While Beasley’s installation engages the land it stands on, it also celebrates the cycle of the seasons and people who work in the service of agriculture. The four parts of the sculpture, each composed of three conjoined panels viewable from the front and back, bear titles that allude to shifting states of being at different times of year: Proscenium| Rebirth, Proscenium| Growth: The Watch, Proscenium| Harvest, and Proscenium| Dormancy: On Reflection. The look of each corresponds with its respective season (summer is bright and bountiful; winter is ruminative and sparse), and all together they take on picturesque qualities and a sense of playfulness unusual among the formidable sculptures elsewhere on the grounds of Storm King.  

Part of that owes to the clothes, made from cotton, polyester, and other forms of fabric, that are scrunched up and splayed within the work. Sourced from places like Goodwill and a laundromat near Beasley’s studio in Queens, the garments include house dresses, work pants, fast fashion from Shein, and T-shirts decorated with characters from Frozen or bearing messages like “Good Vibes.”

“There’s a relationship between live bodies and the kinds of embodied or implied figuration in the work,” Beasley said. “It’s all made of clothing, so there’s always a reference to people, maybe a distinct community or maybe one that is more opaque and unknowable. Where you experience these materials the most is in social settings—you’ve got your ‘outside clothes’ and your ‘inside clothes’—and there’s something about being in such a monumental scale that make you able to focus in on what it means to be human.”

People also figure in the “Proscenium” part of the titles, which invoke the presence of an audience in a sort of theater of the outdoors. Performance, an integral part of Beasley’s practice, will accompany the work during Upstate Art Week in July, in the form of a two-day event featuring musicians and dancers choreographed by Mariam Noguera-Devers (with whom Beasley has worked on projects associated with Ralph Lemon).   

“There’s a scenic, almost theatrical, kind of framework,” Beasley said. “There’s activity—we’re not looking at something that’s stagnant. Being outdoors requires a certain kind of engagement. You’re not sheltered. Things are happening all around you. You have to be aware and engaged in order to, on a basic level, navigate and, on a more complex level, to survive.”