That Sounds Like … The Color Blue

Jazz and hip hop get Katro Storm’s brushes moving. Another artist requires the repetitive sound of crashing ocean waves to work. A third, from the Bronx, needs to hear sirens, jackhammers, and the chatter of passing pedestrians.

Local muralist Katro Storm found that wide range of aural inspiration so intriguing, he brought the artists together in ​“Sound Influence,” the sunny new exhibition of paintings, photography and sculpture he has curated at the at Arts Council at 70 Audubon St. 

Storm presided over the show’s opening reception Thursday night at the Arts Council’s second-floor Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery.

Storm previously curated an exhibition on Negro League baseballers at Channel One on State Street, and also a show of contemporary sculpture, ​“Heavy Metal,” at the Arts Council in 2009.

“You hear the jackhammers when you look,” was the way he described the jittery green, black, and white aerosol paint on canvas work of Bio, a Bronx-based artist represented in the 15-person exhibition.

Bio belongs to an art-making group called ​“Tats Cru” who sign their work ​“Mural Kings,” said Storm.

He described Bio as ​“one of the more famous aerosol artists,” who travels the country making art reflective of an urban environment full of sirens and other sound.

Although Storm did not use the term, what is going on in this jumpy work of black and white shapes, some in forms that evoke bulbous and spidery musical clefs, is synesthesia, the experience of one sensation expressed through another.

Think ​“blue note.”

Storm sits on the visual arts committee of Arts Council’s Director of Artistic Services Debbie Hesse. He came to her with the idea, she embraced it, and Storm has run with it.

Hesse said that in her view the exhibition is ​“not sound as part of performance” but rather sound as part of the creative process. When you gather 15 artists, and give them a general theme with no boundaries, you never know what you’ll end up with.

Synesthesia is in fact infectious in this exhibition. Voiceless works like Sam Gibbons’ air brush painting ​“Feeling It” seem to call out to you. And not only because the subject, like many in Sound Influence, contains both a musician and an instrument.

In this case, a drummer fairly glows with sweat and inspiration, with a microphone over his shoulder, vibrating cymbal in the foreground, and a foreshortened hand that almost reaches out to the viewer to draw you into the set.

Gibbons ought to know how sound and sight intersect. A graduate of Rhode Island College of Art, he is also a professional drummer. He is having his first solo exhibition currently at Channel One on State Street and also plays drums with a West Haven-based group called Black Velvet.

His process flows from one form to another. In creating ​“Feeling It,” Gibbons said he often put down his air brush pen, and picked up his sticks to play the drums and smack the cymbals that sit nearby in his studio.

“I have to listen to abstract music when I paint,” Gibbons said.

He likes to be familiar with the music but not know the words or the melody as he continues to paint. ​“It gets the two sides of your brain” working because the sounds are familiar and yet strange at the same time, he said.

Gibbons ascribes this relation to sound to having had his childhood bedroom in the basement of his house right beside the boiler room. The machinery kept clicking on and off, on and off.

Stencil artist Rocko took Storm’s challenge right into the heart of his family life. He, uh, borrowed his sister’s Eterna guitar and created this moody two-sided portrait of the 1960s balladeer Bob Dylan right on the back of the instrument.

It was the first time he had ever executed a stencil on an instrument. He chose Dylan mainly because his sister loves his music.

But Rocko has no need of sound of any kind to motivate him. ​“I watch documentaries [of artists’ lives]. It’s not their music, but their lives that inspire me,” he said.

Photographer and former Westville gallery owner Jennifer Jane said she had noticed that the Occupy New Haven site on the Green was a generally quiet place (except for the general assemblies).

And yet a very loud sound — that is, impact — is emerging out of that silence. That’s why her contribution to the exhibition is a sheet of digital prints of scenes from the encampment’s daily life.

Her work is like a large contact sheet of prints. Many sport signs scrawled in a rushed, rough-hewn, scraggly manner of lettering that practically shouts at you.

“These people are making sounds just by being there. Their presence is their sound,” she said.

She pointed in particular to the photo of Tommy Doomsday, one of the regulars at the encampment and an artist in his own right. Jane reported that he told her that the composition above the chair is ​“a self portrait of Tommy Doomsday’s head exploding in red, white, and blue patriotism.”

Other artists showing in the exhibition are Cathleen Milburn, Charles Winn, Deme 5, Jaime Kriksclun, Julie Gombieski, Kwest, Marka27, Orlando Dome, Percy Fortini-Wright, Pro Blak, Reo, and Sket.