Devo (Listenin’ Out The Top Of Ya Head)

2021, mixed media sound installation, cast iron pots, bass transducers, iron posts, speaker wire, mp3 players, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY / Berlin Atonal, Berlin, DE*

Here, Toussaint-Baptiste considers abstraction as a way to collapse the conditions that shape the production of meaning. On the gallery walls hang inverted cast iron pots that operate as speakers, each one reverberating at their own frequency. Toussaint-Baptiste has carefully adjusted the pitch resonating from each pot, locating them at relational intervals to produce Scriabin’s “mystic chord”—a synthetic set of harmonic tones where, “its preternatural stillness was a gnostic intimation of a hidden otherness,” is intended to move us to a liminal space and invoke a sense of apprehension. These objects are embedded with histories, making marks on their “flesh” in ways that articulate cracks within homogeneity. This work draws on the history of cast iron pots being placed at doors by enslaved people to absorb sound and evade detection during clandestine gatherings. Meaning has been repeatedly abstracted and re-layered, its sonic texture prickly, cutting through air and obfuscating our formal systems of being.