Joseph Kramer and Kate Levant at Audible

In 2009, Yale University refused to let then-M.F.A. student Kate Levant host a blood drive on campus—as an art project—but the concept found a home at Zach Feuer Gallery in New York. Levant, who lives in Detroit, still creates unusual installations, but her latest, curated by Bethany Childs at Audible, doesn’t invite audience participation. Levant interacts only with Chicagoan Joseph Kramer, a member of the performance duo Coppice, whose sound art emanates from handmade speakers suspended in the gallery. Kramer deconstructs 8-bit audio and feeds each bit into a separate speaker using MaxMSP and Ableton Live software. The resulting crackles and clicks never repeat, Childs explains by e-mail, noting that the strings and wires connecting Kramer’s speakers deliberately echo the threads and grids in Levant’s work.

Hung from the ceiling, unrolled on the floor and draped over the walls, Levant’s assemblages are notable mainly for their odd combinations of materials and textures. Black plastic garbage bags and swatches of silver upholstery sport finely stitched electric-blue fabric trim and fringe. The artist peels away layers from a sheet of blue plastic to leave clear patches, which form a portrait of a man in a Detroit Tigers cap. The off-kilter grids on another piebald sheet of plastic evoke city maps; they also resemble the distressed photos of grates that make up a huge collage nearby. While the affinities between the artists’ practices are difficult to appreciate, Kramer and Levant set up an intriguing tension between the individual elements of their work and their installation as a whole.