After 19 years Artereal Gallery closed in March 2025.
Exhibition
A guitar chord is struck. As the sound consumes the space around you, it diffuses with it a purple haze. This is the experience that Jimi Hendrix was rumoured to encounter upon playing the chord E7#9. Such a response was one of synaesthesia, known as the merging of two or more senses so various stimuli are perceived not separately, but together.
It is these two primary ideas of music and psychology that inspired Sydney-based artist Amelia Tracey to create a new body of work – in the form of three mini-series – entitled Colour Me Curious.
Focusing on three songs that feature this purple chord, Tracey selected a verse from each, and, working alongside two synaesthetes, was able to have these lyrics translated so they could be welcomed not only as words, but as colours. Thinking of the synaesthetic brain as akin to a human black box, Tracey treats these colours as data, and systematically works to produce “digital paintings” that translate the respective song lyrics into a literal visual language for this rare phenomenon. The images are informed not only by their coloured counterparts, but also by the duration each lyric is held for when sung. As such, Tracey’s work juggles the aesthetically abstract with the conceptually literal.
Based on the premise that Jimi Hendrix experienced a synaesthetic response to the chord E7#9, Amelia Tracey used this idea, compounded with era, as the criteria to selecting the songs on which her artworks would be based. Researching songs that fit within these barriers, Tracey eventually settled on three songs:
Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix (1967)
Born To Be Wild, Steppenwolf (1967-68)
Funk #49, The James Gang (1970)
To produce this mini-series, Tracey worked with two synaesthetes, Jesse Jensen-Kohl and Sigrid Boyle. She had each of them translate their alphabet into colours, and used this to generate images depicting each of their colour spectrums. Each colour was then numbered. Using the first verse from both Purple Haze and Funk #49, and the pre-chorus from Born To Be Wild, Tracey randomised the lyrics from each of these sections so the songs they belonged to were not easily identified. Jesse and Siggy were then both instructed to translate each word into its corresponding colour, where they’d simply provide each word with a number. Tracey was then able to use these colours and treat them as data, painting each song’s lyrics from the centre of the image outward. Each “frame” within the image represents a word, and the width is determined by the duration of the note when sung. As such, Tracey explores the colour differences not only between songs, but also between synaesthetes.
Hendrix_2015
Pigment print
Edition of 5
100 x 100cm