Knockin’ Pictures materializes Toussaint-Baptiste’s research into sub-bass and architecture, which has encompassed lowrider car culture, DIY sound systems, sonic weapons, and the felt effects of these technologies on the individual. Toussaint-Baptiste identifies bass as an ambivalent, inescapable aspect of urban experience that particularly affects Black and Brown communities—such as proximity to highways or heavy industries. At the same time, the artist celebrates the capacity of bass to claim spatial agency.
Composed of a DIY car sound system and a metal plate flanked by subwoofers, Knockin’ Pictures Off the Wall underscores the haptic properties of bass. Toussaint-Baptiste’s sculpture emits rhythmic thudding as subwoofers shake the wall, causing the metal plate to tap a fastener beneath it, the result of subwoofers in creative, iconoclastic misuse. Knockin’ Pictures inverts the logic of sub-bass and sound: whereas sub-bass is usually a byproduct of sound, in this work inaudible bass causes audible sound.