NEW YORK, NY.- bitforms gallery announces Volume, the first solo exhibition in New York by Swiss artist Zimoun. On view is an immersive, site-specific sound installation based on prepared dcmotors and cardboard boxes.

Part of a series that received its U.S. debut in a solo exhibition at the Ringling Museum of Art this Fall, the installation emphasizes the grid as a method of visual organization. Precariously balanced rows of cardboard boxes form an architectural space containing a rumbling din produced by mechanical motors humming in unison.

Pulsing rhythmically, each unit in the system reverberates with its own sense of purpose and timing. Temporal microstructures emerge and shift, made visible by collective behavior. With minimalist and low-tech means, Zimoun constructs a blank zone of play utilizing repetition and the physical pressure of vibration.

As an author, Zimoun uses scale and tools of amplification to transform our associations with commonplace industrial objects. Tuned into kinetic and acoustic detail, his obsessive displays of collected materials unlock emotional potential in otherwise banal and chaotic gestures. In his work static volume permeates a space, yielding reductive clocklike operas of the everyday.

For the duration of the show, the gallery’s project room on the 6th floor also features four mechanical works by the artist and a video.

Zimoun (b. 1977, Switzerland) is a self-taught artist based in Bern who builds architecturallyminded platforms of sound. Using simple and functional components, he explores mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems. Zimoun’s obsessive displays articulate a tension between the orderly patterns of Modernism and the chaotic forces of life. Carrying an emotional depth, the acoustic hum of natural phenomena in Zimoun's minimalist constructions effortlessly reverberates.

Zimoun’s first solo exhibition in a U.S. museum opened this October at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, FL and will close Feb 19, 2012. Recent displays of his work include a solo exhibition in Romania at the Contemporary Art Museum, Bucharest; Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan; and Lydgalleriet, Bergen, Norway. Recognized by Ars Electronica and the Swiss Art Awards, Zimoun also has been featured at the Vasarely Foundation, Aix en Provance; Kunsthalle, Bern; Galerie Christinger de Mayo, Zurich; Museum of Fine Arts, Bern; Galerie Denise René, Paris; Art Basel; Frankfurter Kunstverein; bitforms gallery nyc; List Art Center, Providence; CUNY Graduate Center, New York; and Vooruit Art Center, Gent, among others.