Soundings

Tomorrow night in Fisher Gallery, Julia Christensen’s and Brett Kashmere’s classes will present work along with acclaimed video artist Marisa Olson.

Schedule of Events:
7-10pm Exhibition Viewing and Reception (Refreshments will be provided)
8pm Marisa Olson Artist Talk / Illustrated Lecture
10pm REEL FEEL Opening Party, with music by Teengirl Fantasy and DJ Wabberjockey

According to Wikipedia, the term SOUNDINGS “generally refers to a mechanism of probing the environment by sending out some kind of stimulus.”  The SOUNDINGS exhibition on May 12 at Oberlin College will explore this idea, through student work comprised of a range of media, from sound to video to installation. How do we, as artists and thinkers making cross-disciplinary work in the context of new media, send stimuli into the environment in order to interact with our audiences––culling a read on the response, the temperature, the landscape around us?  How does this response develop a feedback loop with our own creative processes, integrating an interactive approach into our practices?

SOUNDINGS will feature work by visiting artist Marisa Olson, who prompted the Oberlin students’ projects with the title of the show.  Olson’s piece, Performed Listening (Boomerang), explores this impulse/response duplicity while recalling the seminal work by Richard Serra and Nancy Holt, who explored a similar question with the video/sound project Boomerang in 1974.

Alongside Olson’s work, the SOUNDINGS exhibition features the work of students from Julia Christensen’s “Creative Resistance” and “Performance/Installation Technology” courses, and is produced by Brett Kashmere’s “Exhibition Practices in the Media Arts” course.  Students involved include Maira Clancy, Brooklyn Demme, Theresa DeSaltels, Vivian Gentry, Adriana Meraz, Sarah Michelson, Cooper Rogers, Susan Russ, Kevin Soulivong, Erika Zarowin, Asha Tamarisa, Ben Bacon, David Bird, Luke Lovett, Nick Weiss, Chrissi Boland, Katie Buono, Kelly Crimmins, Kate Ettinger, Rachel Garcia-Grossman, Kemi Gbadebo, Katie Gleysteen, Eliza Koch, Jack Mintz, Amanda Mummery, Ashley Roberts, Conor Shanahan, Logan Takahashi, and Solomon Turner.

Marisa Olson’s visit is co-sponsored between the departments of Studio Art, TIMARA, and Cinema Studies through the Luce Margin Release New Media Lecture Series and Sight Lines: Dialogues in Film and Media, a Cinema Studies initiative with support from the Blanchard Fund.

Image: Installation view of Performed Listening (Boomerang) (2009), by Marisa Olson.

About Marisa Olson: Marisa Olson‘s work combines performance, video, drawing & installation to address the cultural history of technology, the politics of participation in pop culture & the aesthetics of failure.  Her work has recently been presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou-Paris, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 52nd International Biennale di Venezia, National Museum of Contemporary Art (Athens, Greece), Edith Russ-Haus fur Medienkunst, Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst/ Montevideo, the British Film Institute, the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, the Sundance Film Festival, and elsewhere. She is also a founding member of the Nasty Nets “internet surfing club” whose new DVD premiered at the New York Underground Film Festival. Her work has been written about in ArtForum, Art in America, Folha de Sao Paolo, Liberation-Paris, the Village Voice, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. While Wired has called her both funny and humorous, the New York Times has called her “anything but stupid.” Marisa studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College-London, History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her critiques of contemporary art and digital visual culture have extended to writing for Flash Art, Art Review, Afterimage, Planet, and Art on Paper and to curating exhibitions and programs at the Guggenheim, SFMOMA, White Columns, Artists Space, the Performa Biennial, SF Camerawork, and Rhizome.  She has previously taught Film Studies and New Media classes at UC Berkeley and NYU’s ITP graduate program in the Tisch School of the Arts. She is Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY-Purchase and remains a Contributing Editor at Rhizome, after several years of collaboration.  Marisa was born in Germany and lives in New York.

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