Visual Narrative of Sound

This is just one of the many works currently on display at the show from artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller open through March 9 at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Essentially all the works in the show engage with sound, two pieces filling entire rooms, others triggered by tiny red buttons the size of a bug bite. This one makes no sound, except perhaps in the viewer’s imagination.

Titled simply White House Night and dating from last year, it’s a fragile little painting of a little building against a murky backdrop, picturesque in a macabre sort of way, the piece’s delicacy emphasized by how it is not hung on the wall, but left to lean atop a small shelf. In front, on a piece of wood the odd shape of which suggests it’s been repurposed, are a couple lines of text, an assemblage, two words superimposed, or interjected, into what was either a pre-existing sentence, or two separate ones now joined together.

The combination of painting and rejiggered typography functions like a reverse of a piece by the late artist Tom Phillips: the words remote from the image and formed into a whole, even one with its seams showing, rather than the image serving to reorient a written sequence that preceded the art-making. It shares with Phillips the sense of making the most of limited resources, one of which is language.

There’s something almost accusatory about the edits, the “She” like a later clarification and the “short” carrying meaning the viewer can only guess at. We’re left with the image, so to speak, of a “short groan,” and the lingering presence otherwise of the deep silence that the structure, seemingly illuminated by a car’s headlights, contains.