Richard Chartier

Richard Chartier, 2013. Photo credit: Robert Eckhardt

Richard Chartier (b.1971) is a Los Angeles based artist and is considered one of the key figures in the current of reductionist sound known as both “microsound” and Neo-Modernist. Chartier’s minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself.

Chartier’s critically acclaimed sound works have been published since 1998 on a variety of labels internationally. He has collaborated with noted composer William Basinski, sound artists CoH, Robert Curgenven, Taylor Deupree, and German electronic music pioneer Asmus Tietchens. In installation he has collaborated with multimedia artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, as well as visual artist Linn Meyers.

Chartier’s sound works and installations continue to be exhibited internationally. His work has been exhibited in the 2002 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (US), Sounding Spaces at NTT/ICC (Japan), I Moderni / The Moderns at Castello di Rivoli (Italy), Resynthesis at The Art Institute of Chicago and with the traveling sound exhibit Invisible Cities. His solo and collaborative installations have been shown at the Art Gallery of University of Maryland (US), Media Lab Enschede (Netherlands), Montalvo Arts Center (US), G Fine Art (US), Die Schachtel (Italy), The Contemporary Museum of Baltimore (US), Fusebox (US), and Diapason (US).

Chartier continues to perform his work live thoughout Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America. He has performed at noted art spaces/electronic music festivals including: MUTEK (Canada), GRM/Maison de Radio France (France), EMPAC (US), Musiktriennale Koeln (Germany), Observatori (Spain), DEAF (Ireland), Transmediale (Germany), NETMAGE (Italy), Lovebytes (UK), The Leeds International Film Festival (UK), The Rotterdam International Film Festival (Netherlands), REDCAT (US), and La Batie (Switzerland) and at art museums including: ICA (UK), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (DC), ICC (Japan), CAPC Musée D’Art Contemporain De Bordeaux (France), Musee d’Art Contemporain (Canada), Schirn Kunsthalle (Germany), The Contemporary Art Centre (Lithuania), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (US), and Sculpture Center (NY).

Since 2000, Chartier has curated his influential recording label LINE, publishing over 80 CDs and DVDs documenting the compositional and installation work of international sound artists exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism. Chartier’s Series, the premiere release on LINE, was awarded an Honorable Mention for Digital Music by Austria’s prestigious Prix Ars Electronica in 2001.

In 2010, Chartier was awarded a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship to explore the National Museum of American History’s collection of 19th Century acoustic apparatus for scientific demonstration, with a focus on German physicist Rudolf Koenig’s unique Grand Tonometer (c. 1870-1875), a collection of 670 tuning forks. Some of these recordings were showcased as Transparency, a performance at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Works
Richard Chartier
Tracing 3
2016
Multichannel Audio
Variable lenght
Richard Chartier
Recurrence
2013
Multichannel Audio
15′
Richard Chartier
Interior Field
2013
Multichannel Audio
60′
Richard Chartier
3_components
2002
6-Channel Audio
35′ 05″