Close your eyes and listen to the paintings. Or, listen with the paintings. You’re in Iva Gueorguieva’s studio, it’s early evening, towards the end of summer. A heat wave is breaking across Los Angeles.

You hear the engine of a small prop plane overhead, a distant buzzing, then the wheels of a commuter train on lengths of steel track. A car alarm and a dog barking. There’s the muffled hush of a window fan and something heavy being pushed against the wall. Closer by, the rustling of a broom against the wooden floor. When you shift your weight slightly you hear the wooden floor creak and then you hear your own breath.

Run your hand across the surface of the paintings and feel the rough weave of the canvas fabric. Then the abrupt fold of gauze fixed to the surface with dried paint. Ridges of gauze feel like ribs, you can trace them with your fingers across the painting. Strips of gauze are rolled into lengths and anchored in knots. Stiff stretches of fabric are pulled tight and soft scraps are attached loosely at one end. Your fingers run across smooth pieces of collaged paper and the dry powdery touch of charcoal.

Sights and sounds can be recorded and a recording is a fixing of phenomena in material form, onto paper, fabric, canvas, or tape. In recordings I see the word cord suspended between a prefix and a suffix: re-cord-ings. A cord is like a cable, a thread, or a strand, and also like a unit of measurement. A taut cord can carry a sound, can be strummed like an instrument. A slack cord sways and moves with the wind.

Iva’s painting might be a recording of the external world - its sights and sounds - or the recording of an interior monologue. Or her painting could be the cord connecting the two, transmitting a signal from inside to outside.

The heat isn’t letting up in Los Angeles. In the morning I step outside and my hand brushes a strand of silk connected to a spider web. The web is woven from a single thread. It comes undone and drifts in the breeze.

Munro Galloway, August 31st, 2024.

Munro Galloway is an artist based in Los Angeles