David Chesworth


David Chesworth is an Australian-based interdisciplinary artist and composer. Known for his experimental and at times minimalist music, he has worked solo, in post-punk groups, electronic music, contemporary ensembles and experimental performance. Together with Sonia Leber, Chesworth has created a series of large scale installation and video artworks, such as Zaum Tractor included in the 56th Venice Biennale and This Is Before We Disappear From View commissioned by Sydney Biennale.

Works

Chesworth's creative output includes music, sound art, video, installation and performance, often in collaboration with other artists. His compositions and installations have been exhibited and performed at Ars Electronica, Festival d'automne à Paris, Edinburgh Festival, BAM's Next Wave Festival, Bang on a Can Marathon, Sydney Biennale and the Venice Biennale. In 2012 he was artist in residence at the MONA Festival of Art and Music in Hobart which featured performances by the David Chesworth Ensemble and the showing of several of installation artworks made with collaborator Sonia Leber.
Chesworth's artworks and music often explore their own framing and contextual ambiguity.
Grove Dictionary of Music writes:
Chesworth’s work focuses on the social in human experience, emphasizing shared cultural spaces - how music and sounds of diverse nature interact with cultural memory and performative contexts. The direct appeal of his musical surfaces, his collaborative working methods, and the implicit critique of traditional boundaries between genres, academic and popular subcultures, and art forms in his music and art can provoke audiences who adhere to musical styles and genres.

Early in his career Chesworth coordinated the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre in Melbourne, a centre for experimental music, performance, film and video. He performed extensively in the late 1970s and early ‘80s as a solo performer and with post-punk group Essendon Airport. Through Innocent Records, a label he co-founded with Philip Brophy, he released several solo records that playfully deconstruct cultural tropes, including 50 Synthesizer Greats and Layer on Layer, and with the group Essendon Airport - Sonic Investigations of the Trivial and Palimpsest, and Whadya Want? - Skippy Knows. These have been reissued on CD or vinyl.
Installations:
Together with collaborator Sonia Leber, David Chesworth has created a series of public art and gallery installations that 'exist significantly in the world of the imaginary'. Including 5000 Calls, a permanent 'sonic environment' for the surrounds of the Sydney Olympic Stadium for the 2000 Olympics. Other Leber and Chesworth projects include ', a sound installation for Melbourne City Square, commissioned by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, We Are Printers Too, a 'speculative and archaeological' video set in the former Age Newspaper building in Melbourne. They have created public domain installations in Ljubljana, Cardiff, and New Zealand. Leber and Chesworth were the 2007 recipients of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art's Helen Macpherson Smith Commission, for which they created the major installation work Almost Always Everywhere Apparent. Their recent major mid-career survey exhibition, Architecture Makes Us was exhibited at Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne and has toured to several states including UNSW Galleries in Sydney.
Chesworth and Leber collaborated with Simeon Nelson on Proximities, a 2006 Commonwealth Games public sound-art commission for William Barak Bridge in Melbourne and Oceanic Endless for Melbourne's Cardinia Council in 2007. Dyad, a Leber/Chesworth/Nelson proposal was shortlisted for the 2012 London Olympic Park bridges commission.
Experimental Performance:
Chesworth's interest in exploring wider extra-musical contexts has led to his involvement with performance artworks and experimental opera. Insatiable, was completed in 1986. Since then he has worked with Melbourne's Chamber Made Opera, and with the Melbourne International Arts Festival. In 2010 Chesworth created the performance artwork Richter/Meinhof-Opera which was presented at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art for the 2010 Melbourne International Arts Festival and at the Art Gallery of NSW. The CD Wicked Voice containing material from various productions was released on ABC Classics.
David Chesworth Ensemble:'
Chesworth is the artistic director of David Chesworth Ensemble. The ensemble has released four CDs, Exotica Suite, Badlands, Music To See Through, and Vanishing Tekopia. Panopticon from Music To See Through'' was awarded Instrumental Work of the Year at the APRA Classical Music Awards. The ensemble has given numerous performances including the Melbourne Festival, performances with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at the Forum in Melbourne. International appearances include BAM's Next Wave Festival, the Bang on a Can Marathon in New York, the Kennedy Centre in Washington, and performances in Slovenia, France and the UK, where they appeared at the Big Chill Festival.

Biography

He was born in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Chesworth's parents moved the family from Britain to Melbourne, Australia in the late 1960s. Chesworth studied at La Trobe University, including time with composer's Jeff Pressing, Warren Burt and Graham Hair. He was recently awarded a doctorate in Philosophy at Monash University, for which he was awarded the Mollie Holeman Medal for research excellence. He is currently a Vice-Chancellor Research Fellow at RMIT University. He lives in Melbourne in partnership with Sonia Leber. They are directors of the company Wax Sound Media and have one daughter.

Discography

Albums
EPs and Singles
Collaborations with Sonia Leber include
The APRA Classical Music Awards are presented annually by Australasian Performing Right Association and Australian Music Centre.