Pursuing quilting as a hobby outside of her traditional mediums of drawing and printmaking, Mary Toscano was in the middle of making a quilt when Andrew Rease Shaw, her husband and a professional musician, recognized the shapes she was working with as the waveforms of a Low Frequency Oscillator—a device that generates rhythmic waves at a very low frequency and is used in electronic music to create effects like vibrato and tremolo. At that moment the idea for an almost two-year long collaborative project was born.

The project evolved as the duo dialed in their collaboration, going from Shaw creating soundscapes based off Toscano’s quilting patterns to the inverse, Toscano making quilts with Shaw’s sound-making process guiding the final designs. It is a call and response between the artists, interpreting the influence of one on the other’s medium. The collaboration has culminated in LFO, an immersive quilt-soundscape exhibit which comes to a close at South Salt Lake’s Material Gallery on Saturday, March 8. “Listening Sessions” during the run of the exhibition are available to view and listen with the artists, to discuss and dissect, to meditate and interpret.

Mary Toscano (right) discusses “Composition I and II” with patrons. Courtesy of Material.

The show begins in the first room with a series of eight small, neon letterpress prints Toscano created by breaking down all of the waves into their simplest forms, corresponding to a note in the scale: “Tonic,” “Supertonic,” “Mediant,” “Subdominant,” “Dominant,” “Submediant,” “Subtonic,” and “Octave.” The artist then quilted these paper tiles together to create larger neon paper quilts – Composition I and II – which give a visual prelude to the fabric masterpieces to come in the next room. The main gallery features five quilts, varying in size but united by color palette. They are hung in the chronological order of their making, so that moving in a clockwise formation one witnesses the progression of the collaboration.

Toscano could certainly be mistaken for a professional quilter by the intricacies, color palettes and contemporary interpolations of traditional quilting techniques she has implemented. In listening to Shaw’s corresponding soundscapes, you can “hear” the various geometries hanging on the wall. Together, these works slow us down, letting our eyes move where the sounds take us. The two mediums are never in competition, but rather facilitate interpreting the pieces more thoroughly than our social-media brain-rotted attention usually affords. The experience taps multiple senses, allowing the viewer to see nuance in the pieces, like color variations and specific instruments used to represent the stipples or oscillating twinkle. It’s an ingenious meditation to interpret the art, the sound honing in focus rather than the mind wandering beyond our present. We can think about the relationship between the senses, and how we do not experience any single one in a vacuum.

One of the many beauties of interdisciplinary projects like this is the discovery of unexpected connections between things that otherwise don’t seem to intersect. A Low-Frequency Oscillator is not always heard directly, but its underlying influence shapes the quality of the sound. Similarly, the quilt stitch that penetrates all three layers of a quilt–what makes a quilt a quilt–isn’t always what we see initially beyond the piecing and patterns, but is the underlying stitch that holds everything together. It functions like its own LFO, with each waveform acting as a stitch that binds the quilt together. They are not the present tone, but doing something in the background, adding the texture to the quilt, like a synthesizer modulating sound waves.

Sequencer, Organic cotton fabric and thread, wool batting, machine-pieced, hand-quilted,
72 x 72 inches, 2025 • Sampler, Sound, 6:44, 2025

The quilts are titled with LFO terms and the soundscapes with quilting terms, showing the mediums are not so dissimilar after all. Shaw used Toscano’s pilot quilt “Sequencer” like a graphic score. Structured almost like a piece of sheet music with rows of lined staffs with their different patterns, they read like the tracks on Logic Pro, Shaw’s preferred digital music-making program. You can hear the drama of his film scoring career in the intensity of his soundscapes, telling a story and creating narrative arcs to shift our emotions.

In the second quilt, “Portasound,” paired with the “Drunkard’s Path” soundscape, Toscano reinterprets the traditional quilting pattern, a drunkard’s path, and rotates, inverses and shifts the pattern to create a vibration of quarter, half and two full circles. This piece is fully hand-stitched, from the piecing to the quilting, a feat of patience and dedication. The half and quarter circles radiate off the two full circles, creating a random and improvisational quality while maintaining a completely ordered and regimented arrangement that can be heard in the corresponding reverberations of the LFO undulations.

“Circle of Fourths” sees pinwheels and sawtooths that visualize the staccato of the soundscape “Compass” playing overhead. Each pinwheel has a fourth of its border in a different color that throws the viewers’ attention from one wheel to the next, creating a sense of motion and energy that turns our eyes through a striped, spinning carnival. Yet some pinwheels do not have that colored fourth, allowing our eyes to rest and listen, to be still amongst the waves of movement that build tension. It can almost be overwhelming in visual stimulation, until the regimented staccato of the soundscape guides our eye through the time table across the piece.

The last two quilts, “Theme” and “Variation,” are the distilled products of the entire collaboration. Toscano designed them based on all that she learned from the collaborative process, giving Shaw something different to respond to. Shaw employed more sampled instruments rather than the heavy synthesizer influence in the first three soundscapes, mostly guitar and piano. While Toscano worked smaller, in darker, more saturated colors and more structured designs based on the sound waves original shapes. Taking on similar appearances to those block printed paper quilt “Compositions” that opened the show. A full circle moment.

Throughout the run of the exhibition, the artists have been available for listening-viewing sessions, creating a space of open dialogue between artist and viewer, and creating additional, collaborative layers to the art experience. In these sessions, life can be brought into the pieces even beyond their completion date, ideas and interpretations can surface beyond what the artists intended. We hear how different people’s experiences, with different exposures to quilting, to music making, to art, can interpret the same auditory and visual experience yet share something completely unique. This is the power of the whole experience. Yes, the majesty of these quilts and the meditative quality the soundscapes cultivate are visually and sonically wonderful. Yet the discussion from each piece brings a new life to the art viewing, pulling new things out of the pieces. The listening sessions and discussions become just as much a part of the artwork as the artwork itself.

Variation, Organic cotton fabric and thread, wool batting, machine-pieced, hand-quilted,
24 x 24 inches, 2025 • Whip Stitch, Sound, 5:41, 2025

The exhibition is completely intuitive yet cutting edge. Viewing art in a gallery or museum can often be stiff and clean cut, so silent you can hear the receptionist typing on their keys in the front lobby. In reality, as Toscano points out, when you step into any art-making space, there are sandwiches, rags, and music playing—an environment far from stiff and sterile. LFO breaks down walls between artists and viewers by creating open dialogue that expands the vivacity of the art. It is a powerful way to continue the lives of the pieces beyond what the artists could breathe into them. Viewers and artists alike create open dialogue with each other, with the art, and with our own internal scapes that open up opportunities for self reflection.

LFO, Material Gallery, South Salt Lake, through March 8. Closing Reception, Saturday, March 8, 6–8 pm.

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.