Palpitations–The cadence of heart beats

There are times in life when we are presented with opportunities we never thought possible.
This is the story of one of those serendipitous opportunities, the chance encounter between Marianela de la Hoz and Marc Urselli, the former a San Diego-based painter from Mexico, the latter a New York based sound designer, composer, and music producer from Italy and Switzerland.

The two artists learned about each otherís work and embarked on a mixed-media collaboration project. When they were presented with the challenge of finding common ground in their practices, they decided to integrate sound, movement, and image and combine their inspiration, their creativity, their individual visions, and their preferred media in the form of sound cones, an object that is used to reproduce and present sound and music, but that is made out of paper, which often is the very material used as canvas to present the work of a painter.

Therefore paper, in its circular and conical shape, becomes the common thread between the two artists and their work, the point of intersection through which their collaboration can be presented and reproduced, their unified word, both medium and language, through which their art can be enjoyed and expressed. This common object provided them with both the source of the sound and the destination canvas upon which to paint. The paintings are then animated by the vibrations of sound, as if the tone were breathing life into the images, reverberating through the cone.

The project posed a new and critical challenge for both artists, which required them to step out of their comfort zones and into uncharted territory; but it also presented a tantalizing problem to be resolved by creating a different, original, and inspired work of art.

Palpitations, the title for these collaborations, begins with the idea that there are many ways to consider a heartbeat as a symbol, literally and metaphorically. Urselli and de la Hoz strive to make the observer of these works synchronize their own heartbeats to the rhythm of these wordless pulsating images.

Each piece portrays a heart in different interpretations, from different perspectives,
with different images, in different states of movements, and through different sounds. The common theme tying together these different approaches is the fundamental duality that pervades our lives. pervades our lives: the yin and yang, ebb and flow, life and death, war and peace, darkness and light.