Andy Carey wonders what music  looks like

PHOTO by shea M gauer

If you like color and dots, or if Colorforms influenced your early work, then you’ll love Andy Carey’s current show at {open}. “Sound!” has color and dots (and sound, naturally); it’s a new notion about what art is—and a new language with which to talk about it.

In “Sound,” Carey has turned a handful of pop songs into abstract art, signifying something with handfuls of small, wooden discs.

What it means is up to you—an end as vexing as it sounds to those of us who like our art easy and simple. Carey makes Mark Rothko look like Ed Roth.

Just ask the folks at {open} to put on the soundtrack (and no, you can’t buy it. It’s not for sale.). Then keep telling yourself: These are just paintings. Paintings of sound. Made with small round discs.

Just as Rothko’s colors were chosen by his moods, Carey’s palette seems ordained by his music. For his Let Forever Be (the song is by the Chemical Brothers), you get a scene of something like twilight—a horizontal maroon canvas (Masonite?) punctuated with large pink discs over a rail of smaller blue and teal discs.

His Eight Miles High (the Byrds) also looks like the sky: a row of large gray discs on—what else?—a blue background. Maybe it’s the horizontal canvases, but everything here looks like a sky.

So does 007 (Shantytown), his take on the Desmond Dekker classic—a somehow obvious orange-yellow canvas, adorned with large green manila and maroon discs.

Carey works your brain to understand his. And you won’t, at least not until you reach Deborah and Brian, which are disc portraits of Debbie Harry and Brian Wilson. (Harry’s eye makeup is rendered in glossy discs, while her skin is matte.) They look vaguely like people we think we know—much easier to relate to.

SOUND BY ANDY CAREY {OPEN} | 2226 E FOURTH ST | LONG BEACH 90814  562.499.6736 | THESTORYOFOPEN.COM | TUES-FRI 12-7PM | SAT 11AM-8PM | SUN 11AM-6PM | FREE | THROUGH JULY 20

Tags: andy carey, art, Fourth Street, sound, {open}