Room/Tone

Presented in conjunction with Vogt’s exhibition The Ringing in My Eyes, Room/Tone brings together Bay Area sound performance artists Joshua Churchill, Ven Voisey, and Ava Koohbor for an evening of live, site-responsive sound unfolding throughout the David Ireland House.
Working with electronic and acoustic instruments, field recordings, voice, effects, tape, microphones, and artist-made instruments, the performers will activate the house through overlapping passages of improvised sound. Rather than unfolding as a conventional seated performance, sound will emerge from different points within the house, with some performers moving through its rooms over the course of the evening.
Audiences are invited to move with them: to wander, listen, and encounter shifting harmonies, dissonances, and moments of convergence as sound travels through the architecture and across the exhibitions of Andy Vogt and Amy Trachtenberg.
Bringing together artists whose practices approach sound through place, material, atmosphere, and attentive listening, Room/Tone treats the house itself as both an instrument and a field of encounter.

About the Artists

Joshua Churchill is an Oakland-based cross-disciplinary artist whose sound and light work oscillates between performance and installation, often dissolving the boundary between the two. His work explores atmosphere, texture, decay, and the materiality of sound, transforming environments into spaces of tension, immersion, and contemplation. In performance, Churchill draws upon electric guitar, tape loops, electronics, and field recordings to construct sonic landscapes ranging from meditative drones and spectral harmonies to cascading waves of noise. He has collaborated with filmmakers including Konrad Steiner and Paul Clipson through expanded cinema performances and often performs under the solo moniker Plumes.

Ven Voisey is a sculptor, composer, and designer whose work is informed by an attention to the underlying textures, materials, lines, and frequencies of his surroundings and by a relationship to place. He creates rituals, tools, and circumstances as a means of exploring presence and the relationship between internal and external space, and between the spiritual and physical.

Ava Koohbor works between sculpture and instrument, poetry and circuitry, memory and electronics, Tehran and San Francisco. Her practice explores sound as a field of relations, where listening, making, and material continually reorganize one another. Her work takes shape through instruments, performances, installations, exhibitions, and books. Her latest book, Of Flesh and Frequency: A Poetics of Sound Making, was published by Lithic Press in 2026.
 
Room/Tone is presented as part of Vogt’s exhibition The Ringing in My Eyes, on view at 500 Capp Street alongside Amy Trachtenberg’s Abstract Objects of Devotion.

This program is part of 500 Capp Street’s evolving program supporting artist-driven experimentation, made possible in part through support from the Teiger Foundation.