In the Dark: A Non-Visual Art Show
| Date | 04.14.14 |
| Time | 7pm–11pm |
| Format | |
| Medium | |
| Admission | Free |
A dark warehouse at night. Outside you must wait for a guide to take you in a small group, as you will be led around the exhibit inside and it will be completely dark. You walk in and you can’t see a thing. It’s really, really dark. You’ve been told that for this art exhibit you will only be experiencing the art by your non-visual senses, so that leaves smell, touch, hearing, and taste. The Museum of Human Achievement is looking for non-visual installations (small or large) for the In the Dark: Non-Visual Art show this spring. Please send a detailed description of your vision, including renderings of structures you might need to build, materials used, how the viewer will experience the piece/interact with it if they cannot see it.
Senses to keep in mind:
- hearing (audioception)
- taste (gustaoception)
- smell (olfacoception or olfacception)
- touch (tactioception)
- temperature (thermoception)
- kinesthetic sense (proprioception)
- pain (nociception)
- balance (equilibrioception)
Artist Info
Tiffanie Lanmon
STATEMENT
Vision is a comfort the absence of light denies.
As a musician who relies heavily on sight, darkness assures a most exposed state where, unmoored from dependency, a new relationship with creation must form. “ ” is an improvised piano meditation on vulnerability, anticipation, judgment, and release.
BIO
Tiffanie Lanmon was born in Houston, TX on a Tuesday in 1986. She picked up the violin at however old you are in 5th grade, the Irish tin whistle and clarinet the next year, guitar and bass guitar two years later, and bass clarinet and drums three years after that. She recently completed her second soundtrack for the film Broken Gardenias.
Liz Arredondo
STATEMENT
"Noisy Decadence" has a few elements of surprise. The first thing you will hear and notice is the pop rocks that will explode in your mouth. The mousse will provide an extra texture with coffee grounds and the spice will sneak up on you only after you have swallowed everything. It will be chocolaty, spicy, and rich in texture and taste.
BIO
Liz is 28 years old and lives in Austin, TX. She loves to cook, write, travel, spend time with friends/family, and attend live music/comedy shows. Liz started cooking at the ripe age of 11, though she remembers making eggs her whole life, and comes from a big family that could never afford to eat out. As a result of this, she learned to cook from her mother and grandmother and was exposed to many great lessons and skills of home-cooked meals throughout her adolescence.
While Liz was in graduate school, she had to pleasure of working as a gourmet sous chef under a Master Chef for almost 2 years, which expanded her knowledge of fine dining. In May of 2012, Liz started her food blog,www.dutchlovin.com, to share her recipes and keep up with her writing skills. When Liz is not in her kitchen at home, you can find her working at UT as an Executive Assistant or remotely for Paper Class Inc as the VP of Communications.
Rhett Random
STATEMENT
Find the House Key, 2014, misc. shit in five bags
A nod to that every day ritual of rummaging. A celebration of every lost item searched for within a purse, wallet, pocket, or ambiguous bag. The inevitable thought, "What is all this junk I'm touching?" A chance for people to unify in a shared experience that is personal and universal and stupid. How many people are looking for their keys right now? This piece is meant to reflect that moment of solitude when in search for an important object, but without the stress. Here, a key can just be a key and that junk is merely a temporary curiosity.
BIO
Rhett Radon is an artist and native Texan. Studies plants and records sounds. Enjoys silence. In a perpetual state of rummaging and looking for her keys, always wondering where all this stuff came from.
Daniel Hipolito
STATEMENT
You Feel Me. 2014. Sculpture (Heating pads, Pillowcases, Thread)
BIO
American artist living in Austin Texas. Born 1976 in Elmendorf AFB, Alaska, raised in the suburbs of Houston Texas, BFA in New Genres at SFAI 1998. Concerned with cultural anthropology, craft, obscurity, histories, and hyperreality.
Grace O' Brien
STATEMENT
The Smell of Human Ritual
“It is a question of relationship; we must get back into relation (vivid and nourishing) to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual.
We must once more practice the ritual of the dawn, noon and sunset; the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath and the last.
To these rituals we must return or evolve to suit our needs. For the truth is we are perishing, lacking fulfilment of our greater needs. We are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally in the universe.
The human race is dying, like a great uprooted tree, roots in the air, we must plant ourselves again in the universe.” ~ D. H. Lawrence
We have lost our connection to the earth and our bodies. Uprooted ourselves into a nebulous cloud and are now floating in an ether of denial.
It is through reconnecting to our bodies and our senses that we can once more become available to Evolution.
Within The Smell of Human Ritual, certain items are isolated and fetishized as a way for me to externally process my own egoic narrative.
Seeking to understand the way in which olfactory senses are connected to memory.
The act of creating an experience around these memories is a way of
freeing myself from the nebulous cloud of conceptual thought patterns.
BIO
Grace O’Brien (b. 1990) is an Austin based artist primarily working in Performance and Installation. After graduating from Columbia College Chicago in 2012 O’Brien relocated to Austin and is a resident artist at the Museum of Human Achievement. O’Brien has shown in various group and two person exhibitions in both Chicago and Austin including Transistion and Liminality, Museum of Human Achievement, 2013. Industry of the Ordinary Young Performers Series, Chicago Cultural Center, 2012, as well as A + D Gallery Pougialous Exhibition, Chicago IL, 2012 with Katrina Petrauskas.
Olivia Pepper
STATEMENT
MARIAN APPARITIONS an interior locution with Our Lady of MoHA
For thousands of years now The Holy Virgin Mother has been said to have appeared before the devout in a number of places around the world - Lourdes and Fatima being two of the most famous sites. She is strongly associated with the scent of roses, used in traditional energetic medicine to promote an open and compassionate heart. She often performs acts of prayer or compassion unto those who perceive her, who in turn intone the rosary.
Interior locutions are those occasions when Mary is not witnessed visually, but when her presence is sensed through her voice or touch, and still typically accompanied by the scent of roses.
BIO
Olivia Pepper is a professional witch and mystic who shares her birthday with the Virgin Mary. She reads Tarot, prepares potions, teaches on the use of herbs, and studies the holy mysteries as her current path. She used to run Wardenclyffe Gallery and performance art is one of her great loves. She is currently working on a variety of creative collaborations with good folks around the city and also, eventually, a novel.
Cherry Nobel
STATEMENT
Pain and pleasure are not antithetical to each other, but rather exist on a continuum. At times, our wires get crossed and we feel a sensation that our body objectively tells us is pain, yet our mind interprets it as pleasurable. We are going to explore this place. The nociceptors of our skin send signals to our brain indicating the presence of pain. The impulse then enters the dopamine system, which interprets this sensation in terms of expectation or anticipation of either more pain, or relief from pain, i.e. pleasure. Our dopamine system, paired with our societal conditioning of "no pain, no gain" will allow us to withstand non-harmful pain for short amounts of time. When the pain subsides, dopamine floods our brain as a "reward", causing us to feel euphoric.
BIO
Cherry Nobel is an artist from Las Cruces, NM. She studied at the Paris Institute of Sound and Sociology and holds a masters digress in Pluralology. She widened her artistic scope across Australia, racking up numerous artist-in-residencies, despite her fictional presence. She found her way to Austin, and has avoided light-contact, seeking to transmute speech though touch and prickle. She appreciates your honesty.
Katelena Hernandez
STATEMENT
I was enthralled by the idea of working completely in the dark. Knowing that many of artists in the show would be focused on the challenges and fears that come with the world of darkness, I felt it was my duty to create a space of comfort and wonder. I loved the idea that in a space without light the world around you could be anywhere, anything, and it was my hope that with a simple gesture I could transport the audience into an alternate, embracing world outside of time. I wanted the experience of lying on this hill to be technically communal but still intensely intimate and individual, a theme I've explored before in different ways.
If I've succeeded, the song seems to rise naturally from the ground, sung just to you. The lyrics I'm using come from a poem by William Blake, The Lamb: "Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life and bid thee feed, by the stream and o'er the mead?" It was set to music by Fenno Heath, the celebrated 50-year director of the Yale Glee Club, under whom I sang as a college student. I am not following his melody, technically - I learned the alto part of his multi-part arrangement, and I still hear the song this way in my head, a grafting of the harmony and the melody that is a closer cask of the love I feel for the song and for him than singing it correctly would be. Today, I sing it as a lullaby to my children, as Fenno once sang it to his. I am more atheist than Christian, but the desire to know where we come from is a universal force, and I feel the same reverence hearing that the first echoes of the Big Bang have been found that Blake felt about his conception of the originator and orderer of all things. What a relief to have someone say, "Little Lamb, I'll tell thee, Little Lamb, I'll tell thee..."
Is this hill the beginning or the end? Every night, when we go to sleep, and enter into the darkness, we place ourselves in the liminal space that is both at the same time. Lullabies, like this one, are designed to give us the courage to make the passage.
BIO
Katelena Hernandez is a performance and installation artist based in Austin, Texas. Her work focuses on the concept of comfort: how it is created, how it is perceived, and the complexities of the politics of how it is shared, both among people who know one another and between strangers.
Her works often take the form of interactive experiences that include elements of food, music, costume, or touch. Recent performances include Comfort Sessions at the University Galleries at Texas State University, based on lullabies, and Whatever Lola at CoLab Project Space, which explored cosplay, voyeurism, and Latina film sirens. More information about her work and contact information can be found at her website, katelenahernandez.net.
Henna Chou & Derrick Fore
STATEMENT
'Glass / Nostalgia' is an immersive audioception piece conceived by Derrick Fore and performed byHenna Chou and Brian Purington. Individuals participate in a short intimate meditation involving sound sources collected/created in the past and present, improvisation and composition intersecting among strangers in a 24' x 4' x 9' space.
BIO
Henna Chou is a cultural adventurer living in Austin, TX with a background of experience which includes Geographical Information Systems, sound making, and intense observation. She is a regular willing participant in musical endeavors of various genres.
Derrick Fore is a photographer, musician and educator in Austin, TX. He is currently the band leader and a contributing song writer of the 6 piece instrumental art rock group, Farrago Ensemble. Derrick originally hails from New Orleans, LA and has spent much of his life commercial fishing in Alaska as well as performing in Dalian, China.
Brian Purington is a guitarist and originator of the instrumental post-rock band My Education. Since 1999 My Education has created cinematic and psychedelic compositions blending intense droning guitars with melodic viola. My Education also has an ongoing joint improvisational project with Utah band, (Theta Naught) called Sound Mass. Brian is also the creator/artist behind "Goth Shark" as well as a member of drone trio, Cinders.
