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For centuries the museum space has been inscribed as a 'quiet room'. lt is supposedly a space in which we should quietly and passively absorb culture. Moreover, within the museum history of 'high art', sound is considered to be an aggressive and crude anti-form which has the potential to destabilise the boundaries of distinct art forms. Sound inhabits and invades objects, bodies and buildings and it cannot be controlled in the same way that visible objects are (supposedly) contained within single point perspective. As a counterpoint, Demuth's ironically titled installation The Quiet Room inhabited the entire space of Soapbox Gallery. Even though it was 'situated' in the middle room, an aggressive beating sound from the work reverberated through the walls into other artworks and even spilled onto the footpath.
As it happened, when I approached The Quiet Room it was at a silent stage of its performance. Initially, it delighted my eyes by offering a human-scaled 'booth' from which emanated an indulgent and warm electric glow. The booth could not be entered but it offered hundreds of oversized key-shaped holes, cut into its sides, through which I could peer. Softened reflections of the shapes radiated from the booth across the walls of the room. This effect was strongly reminiscent of children's comfort lamps, the kind that playfully throw light reflections of storybook characters onto bedroom walls. Recently, the light bulb and the box have become a motif in Demuth's work, in which surreal dissections of objects such as body parts are clinically illuminated inside coffin-like boxes. With similarities to the aesthetic approach of Robert Gober, Demuth's representation of the corporeal body is acutely ironic as it is a remembered, but