Moderated Artist Talk and Panel Discussion

Soli Pierce and Bruce Odland

Free | RSVP Recommended

10 May 2025 | 4pm

Join us for a deep dive into the world of Soli Pierce and Bruce Odland as we discuss their immersive installation Sound Forest / Between Worlds consisting of interactive wooden sound sculptures and a meticulously orchestrated audio environment.

Moderated by KinoSaito Gallery Director Megan Meadowlark.

Light Refreshments provided.

Soli Pierce’s first one-woman painting show in NYC was at Beaux Arts in 1983. A New York State Council of the Arts Grant in 1984 allowed her the freedom to pursue cutting edge work in video, technology, photography and assemblage. The grant led to an Off-Broadway theatre piece, a multi-screen installment called SUBWAYOUT, and spoke to the alienation and fast pace of modern life.

Lizanne Merrill and Soli Pierce formed an artistic duo called Merrill & Pierce and their digitized video images in the mid- to late-eighties received recognition from the New York Times and The Village Voice and traveled internationally, with stipend to exhibits in Kohn, Berlin, and Munich, Germany. In response to this work, Pierce was offered, and accepted, an adjunct professorship in photography at New York University in 1989.

When the economics of her life demanded a different kind of creativity, she founded Sherwood Forest Design in 1991, a successful three-decade decorative arts line of heirloom bowls and tableware. Her art bowls are on tables around the world, and they’ve had numerous partnerships with international fine art institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

All through that time, she continued to explore with encaustics, and transformed found natural objects. Her recent Portal and Ghost Forest encaustic series have been exhibited in Venice and London.

In 2021, nature guided her once again. The isolation of Covid-19 nurtured her deeply and offered her time to plant new creative seeds. A new series in collaboration with Bruce Odland entitled The Sound Forest—a fusion of her past and present via portals made with wood, encaustics, beeswax, moss, and sound—calls upon all the senses and simultaneously sounds the alarm, expressing a last, desperate hope, and a call for action.

Bruce Odland thinks with his ears. His work provokes one to reconsider the predominantly visual culture. His first public sound installation commenced in 1977 with Sun Song. Clouds of reverberant sound spread over a public festival in Denver, channeled from the Clock Tower. Since then, he continues working to remind our culture of the importance of sonic resonance and harmonic beauty in public space. He often draws upon the fractal music of nature and has transformed vast industrial soundscapes of cities into harmonic music.

Odland is founder of The TANK Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado. He offers separate lectures and workshops for universities where participants are expected to stretch underused auditory muscles, expand their reach and potential, and think with their ears.

Odland collaborates with teams in film, dance, museum installation and theater. His work includes The Wooster Group, Peter Sellars, JoAnne Akalaitis, Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory, Peter Erskine, Tony Oursler, Dan Graham, Robert Woodruff, Bill Morrison, Stacey Steers, Ron Miles, and many more talents that may be named here.

Recently he co-directed a permanent outdoor sound installation with Laurie Anderson for the Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland.