Wavetable (Nine Night) — gallerykendrajaynepatrick

TIMOTHY YANICK HUNTER
Wavetable (Nine Night)
22 November, 2024 - 19 January, 2025

Continuation, 2024
SEG fabric prints w/ aluminum frame
67 x 44 in.
170.18 x 111.76 cm

Wavetable (Nine Night) expounds upon a Jamaican funeral tradition called Nine Night, which stems from old West African rituals for sending loved ones out of this life. For nine evenings after a death, the community gathers at the family’s home to eat, drink, dance, play games, and otherwise rejoice in the life that person lived. The ceremony culminates on the ninth evening - the most important one - where the community gets one last opportunity to spend time with the spirit of their loved one. The spirit passes through the celebration saying their last goodbyes, then at midnight, they are ceremonially ushered onto the astral plane by the Elders.

A wavetable synthesis is a sound synthesis technique that uses a collection of wave forms stored in digital tables or “layers” as its raw material. Through intricate mathematical remixing or interpolation of these layers, new and complex sounds emerge. The machine makes it possible to generate new sounds from any given soundwave’s most miniscule sonic details, and here serves as tool, principle and metaphor.

Wavetable (Nine Night) illustrates the experience of a biological life: transitioning into and out of it; its various liminal states; contradictory notions of time; and the meaning of peace - through synthetic technological methods. Images are Hunter’s prima materia generally, particularly those depicting the people involved in Black diasporic cultural practices, events, and energies. He both collects and makes the static and moving images in each composition, which might look, on paper, mismatched with the purpose of a Nine Night ceremony. Clips from Footage of students protesting the appointment by Emperor Haile Selassie of Lij Endelkachew Makonnen in Ethiopia meets an explanation of What an ‘Alpha Jerk’ is and how it killed Jimi Hendrix and links that to Dr. Kofi Busia Interview on Ghanaian Mediation. Yet the visuals elegantly, intricately collide references to ritual spirituality into ones evoking the socio-political context in which these rituals exist. A context severely fragmented by the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and thus remixed throughout the Americas. Dispatches from his studies of usually ignored diasporic politics and reverence for Black spirituality cohere in the nonsensical yet comprehensible manner of a satisfying dream.

Music and sound are influences older than visual art in Hunter’s practice, and are foundational to the video works. They are, generally, Hunter’s primordial materials. The detail with which the wavetable machine can splice soundwaves permits him to treat the sonic part of the experience like his snapshots, bringing similarly unexpected atoms to the surface to impress the listener differently than did the tune’s original version. It is like the imagery is a song and the soundtrack sets their rhythm; it evokes the dream-feeling, in motion.

Catharsis, 2024
Dye sublimation fabric SEG print in aluminum frame
36 x 26½ in.
91.44 x 67.31 cm

Translucent Blue, 2024
SEG fabric prints w/ aluminum frame
45½ x 55 in.
115.57 x 139.7 cm

Synthetic Fiber, 2024
Dye sublimation fabric SEG print in aluminum frame
55 x 46 in.
139.7 x 116.84 cm

Untitled (Polyptych), 2023
Dye sublimation fabric SEG prints, Aluminum Frame
108 x 84 x 2 in.
274.32 x 213.36 x 5.00 cm

Things You've Left Behind, 2024
HD Video
Duration: 3:00 min