Curious & Curiouser

Jennifer Tham’s MFA Defence
Tuesday, September 21, 2021 | 6:00 PM PST | ZOOM
RSVP to sca_gpa@sfu.ca

Curious & Curiouser is a dual-part project where listening happens in two different “spaces”: the choral composition and in an artist book. Each uses as source material haiku that the artist discovered on her walks through the industrial waterfront area of East Vancouver; the haiku are engraved on red dog tags and nailed to the wooden power poles she encountered along her path. The haiku texts are translated into two spatial forms that make visible the patterns of order in music, braiding visuality with aurality. The choral suite is a kaleidoscopic word painting — a sound sculpture in five movements — staging the sight of sound through choreographic gesture, movement and theatre; a poetry of motion. Composed as a postlude to the suite, the artist book is a part-score for performing listening, the graphic scores and listening events map sound out of sight — a question of how we hear what we see.