“REVEAL PARTY”: A close-up view of one of the objects that is part of a gallery-wide circuit creating surprising hidden sounds in the installation by artist Jess Rowland. It is on view at Hurley Gallery at Lewis Arts complex at Princeton University through January 3. (Photo courtesy of Jess Rowland)

The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Visual Arts at Princeton University presents a sound installation by artist and Princeton Arts Fellow Jess Rowland in the Hurley Gallery at the Lewis Arts complex. The interactive exhibition, free and open to the public, is on view through January 3.

“Reveal Party” transforms the gallery space into one large connected audio circuit with the generation of sound created by visitors to the exhibition interacting with objects and elements created by Rowland. As the artist suggests, “Sound lives in everything. There is a power in keeping your sound potent; and an equal power in allowing it to be revealed.”

This exhibit provides an extended space in which this magic of sound — sound as a spiritual power — can live in a room-sized musical composition of objects.

Jess Rowland is a sound artist, musician, and composer and the 2018-20 Peter B. Lewis Princeton Arts Fellow. Much of her work explores the relationship between technologies, popular culture, and “other absurdities,” investigating “the weirdness of reality and how we all deal with it.” In addition to an active art practice, she has taught sound art at The School of Visual Arts in New York and continues to present her work internationally. She received her M.F.A. from the University of California Berkeley, where she worked in Adrian Freed’s Research Lab at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology developing techniques for embedded sound and flexible speaker arrays.

She describes her work as continually aiming to reconcile the world of art and the world of science. She has been affiliated with neuroscience labs at New York University and elsewhere, researching music perception, and she has published in the fields of auditory neurosciences and music technologies. Recent installations and performances include the New York Electronic Arts Festival, Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, Berkeley Art Museum, Dartmouth Hood Museum, Harvestworks, and Spectrum NYC.

As a Princeton Arts Fellow Rowland has twice taught the course Sound Art and is currently teaching the course Sound/Material/Mind, both of which explore sound as an artistic, expressive medium in expansive and innovative ways.

The Hurley Gallery is open daily from 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., except December 25-January 1. For more information, visit arts.princeton.edu.