Char Jeré Sets Us Adrift with Black Sonicity

Racial catastrophe is the ongoing crescendo of the unspeakable. Always a resonance at the low end of sonic frequency, it catches in the air and quietly transforms it, enters the body and vibrates within it. The ear has no choice but to keep listening.

In Char Jeré’s show ‘Remembering the Mind: A Study in Progress’, the unremitting and atmospheric sonorities of our racialized order are refracted through concatenated sound installations, paintings and sculptural assemblages. Collectively, these works (all To be titled, 2024) enunciate the metaphysics of what Jeré calls ‘black noise’: a sonic methodology shaped in opposition to the supposed neutrality of ‘white noise’, understood both literally as white-noise machines and metaphorically as the political machinations that have determined the sounds of whiteness as normative.

One adjusts to Jeré’s orbit of ‘black noise’ slowly: it meets the ear in disquieting, puzzling fragments and holds it at the edge of the audible. Several works disrupt and defamiliarize technologies that have set the sonic tone of modern life. The loudest sound in the gallery is the glitchy, anxious-yet-subdued groan of a colossal polygraph machine, on top of which rests an old radio playing clips of the news. The apparatus calls to mind surveillant incursions on groups like the Black Panthers and others who have rebuffed American racial hierarchies. The polygraph appears to run automatically, as if detecting the lies in the air, in the political and aesthetic ether.  A twisted steam of paper marked with the polygraph’s line tracings emerges from the belly of the machine. Perhaps it is getting sick on the brutal deceits of the governing episteme.

Elsewhere, satellites pick up radio signals in the air, weaving a field of subaudible communication which is visualized on a reader installed on the gallery wall. This network of activity runs next to a quintet of Marsona white-noise machines, which emit an incessant, heavy exhale. Jeré, who experiences night terrors, holds a personal stake in these machines, which are used to support the sleeping body but may in fact impede deep sleep by continuously stimulating the brain. The artist’s inquiries into sound extend, in part, from the relationship between these machines and her terrors, and from the latter’s entanglement with the social pathologies of a racialized world. Politics has a sonic and psychic reverb in this show, where the frenzied noise of the Black interior seems to hum within a farrago of muted tones.

Though sonics are Jeré’s cardinal concern, the show is loudest at the ocular register. Rendered in a crudely assertive aesthetic grammar, Jeré’s paintings grip the eye with chromatic intensity and torrid swells of surreal imagery, much of it drawn from her dreams: fires blossom in the middle of the canvas; a doll-like figure carries a banner reading ‘Night Terrors’.

At the centre of the gallery, Jeré has configured a nostalgic shrine of sorts, consisting of cardstock church fans and Comet bleach containers. The latter component brings consumerism’s myth of disinfected, deodorized purity to bear; Jeré’s convulsions of sight and sound remind us of reality’s various political contaminations. The fans, on their versos, bear advertisements for funeral homes, insurance companies and television brands, pointing to the mediations of noise within the triangulation of death, money and technology. The malaise whirring in the air explodes into a panoply of memories and visions in these visual elements.

The racializing imaginary reduces Black sonicity to a duality of belligerent loudness and abject, negative muteness. But the indeterminate vacillations of sound that ripple in the gallery – and stir in its visual terrain – swiftly betray this polarity: we find ourselves adrift on a current of ‘black noise’ that mystifies all categorical determination; a hum that exceeds the clamour of anti-Blackness.

Char Jeré, ‘Remembering the Mind: A Study in Progress’ is on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York until 1 February

^{Main image: Char Jeré, To be titled (detail), 2024, acrylic and mixed media on plywood, 1.2 × 2.4 m. Courtesy: Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; photograph: C. Creagan}