Veronica Szalus
Audio Playback
July 6 – July 29, 2018
In her current installation, artist Veronica Szalus dramatically deconstructs a technology from the past to initiate a conversation that is very relevant today. Utilizing technology that, in its time was revolutionary and became a part of almost every household, yet which has now been all but rendered obsolete by time, Szalus places the common compact cassette tape of the 1970s through the early 1990s at the very center of her dialogue.
In Audio Playback, the cassettes present us with both an artifact and a basic visual form. In its day, the cassette tape, a small boxlike object, was used to record audio for everything from top 40 music hits to personal mixtapes to classroom and/or industrial scale teaching. As in the piece, its message and content reached upward and fanned outward, carried in all directions and sometimes ultimately resulting in chaos—as the tangled tapes show us, falling into disarray both near and far from their points of origin. All of this is underscored in the piece by the constant sound of the functioning technology itself, taking the viewer back to the beginning and the now obsolete mechanics.
And yet, in this visually straightforward portrait, Szalus asks the viewer to consider a larger, more pressing question—”the constant transition found at the
intersections of man-made materials with environmental factors and what that means to the viewer and their world.” Throughout the exhibit, the artist invites the viewer to consider the constant interplay between the tapes, which create a wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor construct, and the environmental factors of light, movement, sound, and time, and then contemplate the impermanence that results.
Air flow and the observer’s movements change the nature of the piece—causing motion among the tapes affecting light and shadow thus influencing the viewers
perspective; the raw sound of the cassette technology enhances this quality. Over time, the structure and nature of the piece itself will change, parts will be moved, the quality of tapes will alter and the piece—over long enough time—will ultimately deteriorate and/or be destroyed. These changes are all inevitable and
continuous over time, as the constant sound of the original, and now obsolete, technology reminds us. The result is a visually engaging, thought-provoking conversation, forcing the viewer to consider the impermanence, the constant transformation and change that occur at the intersections of these factors—here and in our own world.
Veronica Szalus lives in the Washington, DC metropolitan area where she creates installation art. In 2011 Veronica received a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and has shown her work at The Mansion at Strathmore in North Bethesda, MD, the Cade Art Gallery in Anne Arundel, MD, Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, MD, the Arts in Foggy Bottom Outdoor Sculpture Biennial, the Buchanan Partners Art Gallery at George Mason University and at Gallery 42 at University of the District of Columbia. She is also a member of Studio Gallery in Washington, DC.
Veronica studied industrial design at Pratt Institute in New York and jewelry design at FIT. She has served as President of Artomatic, a large Washington, DC based multimedia arts organization dedicated to building community among artists, and has served as a co-chair of PIC Green, an American Alliance of Museums professional network focusing on environmental sustainability. She is employed at the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association as the Executive Director.
