Metamorphosis Visualizing the Music of Paul Hindemith

The JSMA and Eugene Symphony Association celebrate an innovative collaboration with four Oregon visual artists in response to Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)’s orchestral masterpiece Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Weber. Over the past year, while working closely with Eugene Symphony Music Director and Conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong, Mika Aono, Anna Fidler, Andrew Myers, and Julia Oldham created new works in printmaking, painting, drawing, and animation. Each commissioned artist was inspired by the virtuosity, imagination, experimentation, and humor inherent in Hindemith’s most popular work. At a future date, the Eugene Symphony’s “Beethoven’s Fifth” performance at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts will explore how music and art bring us closer together with a program that includes Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis accompanied by four corresponding videos of the artists’ works (created by JSMA design services manager Mike Bragg and featured artist Julia Oldham to make visible the stages of creation in each project).

Mika Aono (Eugene), a multidisciplinary artist, teaches printmaking and works as a studio technician in the UO’s Department of Art. She explores humanness in absurdity and futility through laborious processes, giving meaning to the meaningless.

In Anna Fidler (Corvallis)’s recent work, bold, geometric, and opaque elements are a language for expressing her experience of energy.

Andrew Myers (Corvallis) explores the concepts of conservation and preservation of wild places and creatures in work that is drawing-based with elements of installation, printmaking and sculpture.

Julia Oldham (Eugene)’s work expresses moments of hope in a world on the edge of environmental collapse. In a compilation of new videos she created in response to Hindemith’s music, she explores the potential in places where human civilization and nature have collided uneasily.

This exhibition and related programs at JSMA were made possible in partnership with Eugene Symphony Association and with funding from an Exhibition and Documentation Support Grant from The Ford Family Foundation and the museum’s Hartz FUNd for Contemporary Art. The exhibition was curated by McCosh Curator Danielle Knapp with assistance from curatorial intern Zoey Kambour, an M.A. student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture.