IMA alum Katie Mathews and IMA student Jess Shane collaborated on an ‘audio first’ project called Signal and Noise which has been exhibited in several places including the Prismatic Ground Festival and now it’s included in a group exhibition called Sound of Fire at VisArts’s Kaplan Gallery near DC. The show opened on January 25th and is on view until March 12th. IMA alum Kaija Siirala edited the project. About the exhibition, “With over 750 military bases in about 80 countries around the world, the US military challenges our notions of “American soil.” As the largest contributor towards climate change, its global impacts are difficult to see and measure. Through video, audio, and sculpture, Sound of Fire contemplates the effects, rhetoric, and narratives of “US military,” proposing listening and other sensorial engagements as a way of “seeing.” Works in this exhibition rely on speculative fiction to conjure new understandings of what it means to occupy and what it means to resist and reclaim. Artists: Nayda Collazo-Llorens, Jonathan Perez, Eric Rivera Barbeito, Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez and Joshua Roca Gonzalez, Jess Shane and Katie Mathews, in collaboration with Mansoor Adayfi, John Dominic Colón”
About the project : “Signal and Noise engages the sense of sound to understand the unseen –particularly, the interior and exterior operations of Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, a famously covert US military prison on the coast of Cuba where over 700 people have been detained since 2002. Fusing field recordings by poet Jordan Scott whose ambient sounds act as a means to bypass strict media censorship rules; the voice of former detainee Mansoor Adayfi who recalls how sound shaped his experiences of torture and hope; and various moving images from within and around the site, Signal and Noise immerses the viewer in one of the most concealed US military sites.”
https://www.katie-mathews.com/
https://www.jessshane.com
https://www.visartscenter.org/event/sound_of_fire/
