Devon Turnbull: Meet the Speakerhead Wiring the Art World for Sound – ARTnews
10 March 2026
One of the standout works in “Art of Noise,” an exhibition of music-related design at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, is a listening room devoted to a sound system built by Devon Turnbull, also known as OJAS. In the past few years, Turnbull has garnered attention as a high-fidelity evangelist who has built speakers, turntables, and amplifiers for Virgil Abloh, Supreme, the Brooklyn music venue Public Records, and numerous other high-profile collaborators.
Turnbull’s entrée into the art world began with when he was included in a group show at Lisson Gallery in New York and continued with “Art of Noise,” which originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2024 and will be on view in New York from February 13 through August 16. In the former-mansion environs of the Cooper Hewitt, Turnbull’s HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3 has its own designated space in what was Andrew Carnegie’s personal library, where the artist or others affiliated with him will play music on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays from 1 to 4 p.m. At other times, the sound system will play previously assembled playlists. On occasion, high-profile guests will join. So far, since the listening room opened early in December, that list has included filmmaker Josh Safdie playing the soundtrack to Marty Supreme as well as the ambient musician Laraaji and artist Tom Sachs.
How did you connect with Lisson Gallery at the start? The work you do is different than the rest of their program.
That’s the wildest part of the whole thing. I’ve been doing this sort of work for 20-plus years, and my vision for it has changed very little in that time. The work has evolved and gotten better and more complex, but for a decade or so, no one cared. I had a few friends who were kind of patrons and were commissioning things for themselves. Some of those friends were influential people, like Virgil Abloh, but I was just doing occasional projects and mostly just focusing on building things for myself. I didn’t really care about recognition, because it didn’t seem like it was going to come. This is my passion project, and that’s why I do it.
I met Hugh Hayden, who’s a Lisson artist, at a wedding I think 10 years ago. I had a listening room set up in my house, and a lot of the recognition I was getting was from people seeing clips of me listening to music on Instagram. I would just put a clip of a record playing, and people started wanting to come over and hear the system and talk about sound and stuff like that. Hugh came over and said, “You should really meet [Lisson Gallery CEO] Alex Logsdail. He loves music and hi-fi, and I think he’s going to really dig all of this.”
Read the full interview by Andy Battaglia for ARTnews here.
Image: Devon Turnbull, HiFi Listening Room Dream No. 1 at Lisson Gallery in London, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
