Client: Upfor Gallery

Overview

2020
Strata: Zero, Zero_One
Solo Exhibition, Upfor Gallery, Portland OR

The STRATA Series LED formations translate vocal data visualizations of migrant collaborators to provide portals of presence as mechanisms of anonymous spatial occupations.
These unique, individual representations signify communication as intentional existential acts of freedom.Each vocal presentation illuminates the temporality of the human condition through nomadic virtual infrastructures to support the harmonics of difference as a choral act of resistance.

Goals

Through the porosity of these infrastructures, frequencies of opacity embrace a nomadic philosophy, leveraging the liminal space between these positions of embodiment is the constructive place for the viewer to consider –relation – these conditions upon their own physical presence and the vulnerabilities and strengths of intersubjectivity.

Radical beauty is embraced through the tool of abstraction, enabling an open translation of ourselves as the celestial embodiment of potentials.

Process

As part of this project Roney Studio initiated a vocal database – STRATA: Mantras – for anonymous participatory contribution. Participants were able to record a mantra, phrase, song or prayer and see it become flowing animated movements across the LED video surface like visible sound waves. The Studio remains committed to maintaining the privacy and authorship rights of all participants and contributed materials. STRATA: Mantras was designed to ensure the anonymity of those involved and to allow for participants to decide when and how their contributions are used.

The original database work was a part of Strata: Bending Fields of Relations, developed over the course of a two-year residency, curated by Director Joey Orr, as part of the Integrated Arts Research Initiative at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, funded by Mellon Foundation and the Andy Warhol foundation.