“From Signal to Decay: Volume 3,” a compact exhibition of sound and drawing by Trevor Mathison, organized by Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and Oliver Fuke, trembles with an expectant stillness. It marks the middle component of a five-chapter presentation of Mathison’s work across media, whose shadowy wavelengths were introduced last year in a more architecturally imposing show (somehow the artist’s first in a UK institution) at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art. At Peltz, Mathison’s experimentation with the sensorial capacity of sonic technologies continues to reveal new textures, mostly in the form of a dominating, droning audio work. It also continues to extricate Mathison’s decades-long practice of critical innovation in Black industrial soundmaking from being identified mainly through his association with other artists, most notably as a member of the Black Audio Film Collective and longtime collaborator of John Akomfrah.
A suite of fifteen graphite drawings—oblique landscapes evoking fog-shrouded expanses, static-filled screens, ghosts in machines—form a corridor inside which we’re invited to succumb to the void-like wonder of the exhibition’s harmonies and disharmonies of sound, sight, and space. Some feature planes almost entirely enveloped in smudgy black, while others are more pictorial: In one corner hangs a suggestive monochrome rendition of four sailboats against a thin, stark-white horizon. All succeed in drawing out the whirring, anesthetizing mysteries of the audio work, enhanced as well by the exhibition’s absence of titles and didactic hand-holding. “It’s just a lot of sound, with none of the fury explained,” one critic complained about “From Signal to Decay”s first iteration. But the project’s lean into the purely sensory complements Mathison’s extraordinary negative capabilities, extending an invitation to close your eyes and tune into its tremors across temporal and disciplinary landscapes.
— Dylan Huw