Tag: Listen!

USA
1954–2016

https://www.thewire.co.uk/news/41182/sound-artist-and-acoustic-ecologist-jed-speare-has-died

Jed Speare was an artist from Boston working in variety of media. Initially trained in music composition, he created works in time-based media such as video, sound, and performance art, and conceptual and community-based works for over twenty-five years. His work has been presented in festivals and exhibitions in such places as San Francisco, New York, Boston and the New England region, and abroad in Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Taiwan. He was a member of the Mobius Artists Group of Mobius, Boston’s artist-run organization for experimental work in all media, and served as its Director from 1996 to 2004.

A QUIET ZONE II is a part of body of work by Speare that deals with the sound environment. Other works in this vein include CABLE CAR SOUNDSCAPES, an album on Smithsonian Folkways Records; PEACEFUL – AN PING, a project on the soundscape of a waterfront village of Tainan, Taiwan that used sound walks of the village’s oldest streets and aural histories of the residents’ sonic memories to suggest that sound could be used as an element in the future restoration and urban planning of the city; AUDIOGRAMS, a text and image work which explores his experience as an industrial hearing conservationist and the effects of hearing loss; A QUIET ZONE, a photographic, text and multimedia work about a neighborhood in Fitchburg, Massachusetts by that designation; and the artists books Crushed Buckets and I Call You.

Korea

So-Yeon Park was born in Pusan and raised in Seoul, Korea. She is currently living in Lawrence, Kansas, where she is assistant professor in Art at the University of Kansas. She holds an MFA in art from Ohio State University, a BFA in Sculpture/Ceramics from California College of Arts and Crafts, and a BFA in Arts and Crafts from Seoul Women’s Universit. Park has exhibited and performed in solo and group shows in Columbus, Ohio, at Marin Headlands, Golden Gate National Park, California, and in Seoul, Korea. She currently has a sculpture/performance solo show at the Sculpture Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

© Eric Létourneau, Quatre re-traités* tiré de ‘”ils” “viennent” : Khédive et Mamelouk, en un seul, sur son patron (work-in progress), 2013. Photo Jordan Tannahill.

Canada

Eric Létourneau has been active since the 1980s as an intermedia artist and a sono-temporal architect. He pursues an artistic practice based on the creation of situations within the social fabric. He has produced roughly 50 contextual works and has presented his work in more than 10 countries. He is particularly interested in the instrumentalization of collective memory by institutions.

From 1999 to 2001 he worked for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), producing concerts, recordings and radio programs about new music, sound poetry, audio art and radio art. Eric Létourneau is a frequent contributor to publications and catalogues about performance art, and has written for Inter, Parallelogramme and esse. He currently teaches art history at Collège André-Grasset and works as an independent curator.

Ireland / Canada
www.lindaraedornan.ca

Linda Rae Dornan is an interdisciplinary artist creating video, installation and performance art, and writing. Her work explores visuals, performativity and embodied text about place, memory and being. Language, materiality and ephemerality are the threads woven within her work. Her visual explorations using language have become increasingly non-narrative, evoking interior space, memory and loss. Her performances incorporate words and silence in a durational format. She has won the Strathbutler Award and the Linda Joy Award, has been the recipient of many grants, and has exhibited/screened works across Canada, the United States, China and Europe. She lives in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada.

Curated by Paul Couillard

ARTISTS
Erika DeFreitas
Linda Rae Dornan
Eric Létourneau
So-Yeon Park
Jed Speare

Five Holes: Listen! presents five unique performance ‘maneuvers’ dealing with the sense of hearing. Five Holes: Listen! is the fourth offering in the multi-year Five Holes series that seeks to examine the nature and importance of bodies (performer and audience) in performance art by focusing on individual senses.

This iteration in the series considers acts of “listening” as they are carried out by and impact upon physical, social, political and spiritual bodies. In OPEN, Linda Rae Dornan presents herself as a solitary figure, sitting quietly in the city, listening—encouraging us to also stop for a moment to hear what we normally ignore. Erika DeFreitas performance, entitled Untitled: Selective Hearing, offers her presence for a one-on-one exercise of listening as a way of locating the self. In A Quiet Zone II, Jed Speare lobbies the city for a quiet zone that would serve as an area of sound awareness. So-Yeon Park assembles chanters from various cultures to direct their voices toward individual participants’ wishes as a way of channeling transformative energy in Interfaith Chanting/Praying Ceremony. And in Standard III, Eric Létourneau evokes silence as a way of marking and remembering all of the world’s victims of political persecution in a multi-layered project that interrogates the role of the State and of mass media in silencing “silence” itself.

PROGRAMME

OPEN by Linda Rae Dornan
September 15, 2004 @ 8:00am–12:00pm | Queen’s Park, Toronto
September 16, 2004 @ 8:00am–12:00pm | University Avenue traffic island, south of Gerrard Street
Artist Talk: September 16, 2004 @ 8:00pm | WARC, 122–401 Richmond Street West

OPEN features Linda Rae Dornan in a durational tableau performance of listening, only listening, in an open space surrounded by non-functioning audio speakers. It is about slowing down, actually hearing the world breathe around oneself, and being part of that breath. Time slows down, and one is absorbed into the soundscape, into hearing oneself and the world.

Untitled: Selective Hearing by Erika DeFreitas
September 25–October 24, 2004
Saturdays & Sundays @ 9:00am–5:00pm | various locations
Presented in conjunction with the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art

Untitled: Selective Hearing explores the sense of hearing and more specifically the act of listening as an intimate act of inclusion, trust, and the location and dislocation of self amidst a variety of public venues in Toronto. Artist Erika DeFreitas will be offering her shared presence to those who are interested in taking the time to sit and listen to their surroundings. Participants sign up for a particular place and time to join the artist in a conscious act of listening to the surrounding space. DeFreitas notes about this piece: “Our society depends heavily on conscious auditory perception as being selective, and this perception has created a culture of selective hearing. Our ability to ‘block’ things out allows us to choose when we want to listen, what we listen to, and what we hear. Various components of our surrounding environment have perpetuated this practice of filtering sound and have dictated what is allowed to take root and what must be discarded. Such forms of selective hearing and escapism can alter our environment in a surreal way. In his writing about conceptual art, I believe that an awareness of the ways that a sense of space or environment can be established through sound, as well as an understanding of how we might unconsciously use sound to essentially make an environment transferable, can develop through a process of active listening.”

A Quiet Zone II by Jed Speare 
October 7, 2004
Artist Talk: October 7, 2004 @ 4:00pm | Rectory Café, Ward’s Island

In A Quiet Zone II, Jed Speare seeks to establish a zone of quiet through municipal channels in a neighbourhood of Toronto—not for the purpose of restricting noise, but for promoting sound awareness and contemplation. Under city by-laws, Quiet Zones regulating noise activity can be established around hospitals and retirement homes. Speare’s proposal seeks to overturn and expand the notion of the Quiet Zone philosophically and idealistically, creating an occasion and site for an aesthetic experience, listening to a particular urban environment. For the past several months, Speare has been seeking the appropriate agency to initiate a formal process to create a zone in the inner harbour at Ward’s Island. From late September, Speare will be working in Toronto to meet with community members and officials and continue this process, culminating in an event on October 7 that will present his progress to-date, at a site and time to be determined. A Quiet Zone II is supported in part by a residency at Do While Studio in Boston and a grant from the Nicholson Foundation. Download Jed Speare’s Quiet Zone (pdf)

Standard III by Eric Létourneau
Artist Talk: October 21, 2004 @ 9:00pm | XPACE, 303 Augusta Avenue, Toronto
Presented with 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art

Eric Létourneau’s “manoeuvre” Standard III began as a two-hour uninterrupted nationwide radio broadcast on Radio-Canada on April 11, 2004 (Easter). The program featured 198 30-second periods of radio silence punctuated by an alphabetical listing of every country in the world. The same phrase introduced each silence: “Thirty seconds of silence for domestic and foreign political victims…” This broadcast was recorded live off the airwaves and remixed for publication on two CDs along with a text that considers the effects of administrative regulation and State control on mass media. Beginning in October 2004, copies of the publication will be sent through diplomatic channels to each country of the world. On the occasion of each country’s national celebration, its head of state will be contacted to verify the receipt and subsequent response to the CD.

Interfaith Chanting/Praying Ceremony by So-Yeon Park
January 27, 2005 @ 7:00pm
Alumni Hall of Victoria College, University of Toronto, 91 Charles Street, Toronto

Interfaith Chanting/Praying Ceremony is an interactive event organized by Korean artist So-Yeon Park. Park has assembled a circle of local volunteer chanters from a variety of religious traditions who will direct their voices toward participants’ wishes as a way of channeling transformative energy. Audience members are invited to walk around the circle and listen, as well as to enter the circle and hold a wish while the chanters surround them and pray for their wish to come true. Park explains, “This spontaneous multi-faith circle of chanting and prayer brings together people from many faiths. Religious/spiritual practitioners are invited to experience and share their own deep faith in an environment of diverse spiritual devotion. Viewers will have an opportunity to witness and feel the power of prayer.”

Canada
www.erikadefreitas.com

Erika DeFreitas’s multidisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including: Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; Gallery TPW, Toronto; Project Row Houses and the Museum of African American Culture, Houston; Fort Worth Contemporary Arts; and Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita. She is a recipient of the 2016 Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Finalist Artist Prize, the 2016 John Hartman Award, and was longlisted for the 2017 Sobey Art Award.

Curatorial Statement by Paul Couillard

Five Holes foregrounds our bodies by examining aspects of the five basic human senses. The presence of bodies—the performer’s body and the audience members’ bodies—is an essential element of performance. We ‘perform’ when we bring our bodies into relationships with an audience in time and space. Five Holes considers some of the ways in which sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste allow us to perceive. At the core of this project is a concern with our bodies as a root aspect of humanness. The presence of bodies—the performer’s body and the audience members’ bodies—is an essential element of performance. We ‘perform’ when we bring our bodies into relationships with an audience in time and space. Five Holes foregrounds our bodies, considering some of the ways in which sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste allow us to perceive.

Civilization has constructed a worldview where ‘virtual’ reality has become a tantalizing ideal – a desired end point that will offer our consciousness and imagination a new beginning and a new territory to explore. At the same time, cultural theory has come to consider our bodies as something separate from our selves – referring to an objectified Other, ‘the body’, sometimes understood as a ‘text’, and sometimes considered as one ‘site’ among many to be inhabited. Our bodies are now subject to interrogation on multiple fronts, particularly in the realm of performance – from Stelarc’s assertions that “the body is obsolete” to Orlan’s surgical remodeling of her physical appearance. It seems that we are following an inevitable path, guided by René Descartes’ oft-quoted maxim, “I think, therefore I am.” We are in a headlong rush to abandon our bodies – our imperfect, traitorous physical forms that suffer, wear out and eventually die. We seek immortality and omnipotence, two qualities that our ‘minds’ can imagine but that our ‘bodies’ can never attain.

But where and how are knowledge and imagination generated? For me, the answer lies in the daily struggles and resistances that my body undergoes. I am motivated by imperatives – survival, empathy, a search for fulfillment – that are bodily driven. Learning does not come from having my thoughts fully realized the moment that I think them; learning comes from experience, which is another way of saying that it develops through the process of making my thoughts manifest in physical form. Learning happens as I go about trying to reconcile my theoretical ideal with the exigencies of physical laws and available resources. To ‘do’ inevitably brings a deeper, more nuanced understanding than to ‘imagine’. This is not a simple or straightforward process: it brings pain as well as pleasure, and often what I discover seems neither fair nor friendly. Nevertheless, I am not so eager to leave behind my cross-eyed, bow-legged body. I love this life, and I am certain that what I have to learn or discover can only be manifested through my body.

We define our living bodies in multiple ways: as material (flesh, blood and bone); as process (respiration, circulation, electrical impulses); and as vessel (of experience and consciousness). It could be argued that our senses are what constitute our bodies. We associate our senses most directly with ‘sensation’, the domains of pleasure and horror, but our senses also play a larger role in connecting us to the world and shaping our identities. They are how we apprehend the world—the points of intersection between our individual consciousnesses and the actuality of time and space. It is through our senses that we undertake and negotiate our relationships to each other and our surroundings. Human senses have developed over time. Each sense provides us with a different set of information, evolving, if we believe Darwin, according to what best allows us to survive and prosper as a species. As conditions change, and as our bodies adapt in other ways, presumably our senses could also change. Five Holes provides artists and audiences with an opportunity to test their senses as they are now, informed by both history and imagination.

Five Holes brings us together in this time and this space to see, touch, smell, hear and taste. These varied projects are united in their search for the possibilities—not only for pleasure, but also for knowing – that the senses have to offer.

Five Holes was a multi-year, multi-event series curated by Paul Couillard. Spanning the years 1995–2006, each iterative event highlighted one of the body’s five senses.

Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you (1995)
Five Holes: Touched (1997)
Five Holes: reminiSCENT (2003)
Five Holes: Listen! (2004)
Five Holes: Matters of Taste (2006)