Lago is an LP recording created in dialogue with the photobook (of the same title) by American photographer Ron Jude, published by MACK (UK).
The two compositions revisit the sites of Jude’s initial photographs in and around the Salton Sea in the Southern California desert, and use site specific field recordings and analogue processing to craft an aural counterpoint to the photographs themselves and the photographic process. Contact microphones and hydrophones were used to gather sounds from flora, desert refuse, architectural ruins and the Salton Sea itself to create an expanded study of the acoustic ecology of the area. The work weaves together location recordings alongside interviews to construct an acoustic portrait of the desert that is steeped in intimations of narrative dealing with loss, history and a landscape haunted by a spectre in darkness. Lago is an attempt to enter into the perceptual horizons of the desert whilst also engaging a past that shapes the encounter.
The work is released as a digital download as part of the photobook Lago by Ron Jude on MACK Books UK and as a physical LP release by Shelter Press based in France.
These recordings fall somewhere between fact and fiction, between documentary journalism and imagined aural environments. Given so much information about their source, they cannot but seem grounded in a specific place and time, yet they still retain a vital edge of mystery that renders them deeper, more potent and more ambiguous than a piece of reportage could achieve’ Ian Melaney. The Wire Magazine UK. Jan. 2016
Bonnetta's work is installed at Gallery Lusiotti in Los Angeles as a two channel sound installation as part of the exhibition of Ron Judes Lago running from January 16 - March 12, 2016.
Shelter Press will be part of the Printed Matter’s LA ART BOOK FAIR 2016
February 12 – February 14, 2016 at the The Geffen Contemporary at Museum of Contemporary Art.
The bookfair will constitute the official North American launch for Lago. Bonnetta will be in a group talk with Shelter Press ( Felicia Atkinson & Bartolomé Sanson)
Friday, February 12 - 7:30 PM at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive.
http://shelter-press.org/sp069-joshua-bonnetta-lago/
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20160212140106173