Giant Steps (Primary Title)
Enrico Riley, American, born 1973 (Artist)
I am trying to work with the attitude that many sources and types of subject matter can influence me as I work and that this information can be deployed in a nonlinear fashion. —Enrico Riley
Riley, who teaches at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, was raised in Richmond. His art often concerns how visual art can represent sound. The sixty-one panels here refer to jazz saxophonist John Coltrane’s 1959 classic “Giant Steps.” Altogether, the squares and rectangles recreate the full score as shown in the Real Book, a compilation that reduces jazz standards to a single page of basic chord progressions and melody by leaving out solos and repetitions. Undertones of color lend subtle variations that relate to individual notes while a final white layer “harmonizes” the diverse parts, suggesting that color and whiteness, as much as visual art and music, are the work’s subjects.
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