EARTHFEST Warmup :: Scott Sherk | roachtobin [LONG FORM]
Sunday, April 19, 2026
169 Bowery NYC
DOORS 7:30p | SHOW 8:00p
Program Notes
Campfire by roachtobin
Campfire interprets the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California as a spatialized durational sound installation. The work is driven by a remarkable data set collected by the Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Group (WUI) at NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Roachtobin collapses 24-hours of the WUI data into 60 minutes, and a clock in the gallery communicates the time of day as events unfold. The work uses Max/MSP to re-imagine the volume of the gallery as both a geographic area (the afflicted Butte County) and also as a series of intensities and energies suggested by the data.
Aural Places by Scott Sherk
Aural Places is a collection of immersive sound works accompanied by video visualizations. These works reflect a sound practice grounded in field recordings— capturing the ambient, often overlooked sounds of the world, and reimagining them into spatial auditory environments. The works range from recorded sounds of a frozen lake in Massachusetts to the melting glacial rivers and north winds of Iceland. The works are not documentaries of landscapes so much as encounters with place. The videos function as anchors, while the multichannel audio environments place the listener inside acoustic spaces that are often hidden, or spatially reimagined.
About the Artists
Roachtobin is the duo of John Roach and Jay Tobin.
John Roach is an interdisciplinary artist with a particular interest in sound and multisensory experience and he builds environments that blur the line between what we see and what we hear. His sound compositions often focus on themes related to ecological systems, biodiversity and climate and exist in a space between electroacoustic music, documentary and experimental radio art.
Jay Tobin is a web developer and sound designer based out of Brooklyn, New York, as well as the founder of NYC-based multimedia design firm Dayflower Studio. His community-focused practice centers the overlooked minutiae of everyday life, with unplanned, commonplace audience and data interactions acting as his artistic focal point. His work blurs the lines of authorship, instead preferring to amplify the voices of the other to capture the full scope of moments in time, be they conversations, gestures, zeitgeists, or ineffable coincidences.
Scott Sherk is a sculptor who often works with sound. He has exhibited widely including exhibitions at the Katonah Museum of Art, the Allentown Art Museum, Kim Foster Gallery NYC, and Leslie Cecil Gallery NYC. His exhibitions have been favorably reviewed by the New York Times and ArtForum. His sound work has been released on CD by 3Leaves, and/OAR, and net releases by Stasisfield and Wandering Ear.
Scott Sherk was a Professor of Art at Muhlenberg College. He has been a recipient of the Class of ’32 Research Chair and twice recipient of the Hoffman Research Fellowship. He currently holds the position of Professor Emeritus. He has collaborated and curated with Pat Badt as part of http://www.thethirdbarn.org.
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