within & outside
SCA MFA Online Fall Show
September 1 – 30, 2020 | Online & Instagram
Rahul Bader, Jean Brazeau, Charlie Cooper, Karla Desentis Rodriguez, Aakansha Ghosh, Somayeh Khakshoor, Giselle Liu, Mansi Patel, C. Olivia Valenza, and Faune Ybarra.
The SCA MFA Online Fall Show is showing of works-in-progress by the SCA MFA second year cohort, presented online here and on the SCA's Instagram account.
Throughout the summer months, we have continued our investigations of sound, performance, film, design, and visual arts while renegotiating what it means to keep making in the face of global change. Imposed as a marker of time, the "new normal" has helped us to understand what is happening right now. In that understanding, we are renegotiating our making. Is it pertinent to continue with the same lines of research, are we communicating effectively? If once our processes entailed a solitary endeavouring within, now we find ourselves interacting with a mediated audience through virtual windows; if our research was resourced to different groups of people to realize itself, now we look for ways to continue nurturing the bonds that cemented our practices. In within & outside, we share the ongoing adaptation of what could become our graduation projects understanding that they might be experienced by a “new audience” moving forward.
Rahul Bader
BREATH, BRAINS & BEATS
Interactive Performance & Installation
This project includes a performance and interactive installation intended to explore musical rhythm and embodiment with the use of interactive technology. Utilizing 2 Muse brainwave sensing headbands, a bharatnatyam dancer and tabla player create a dynamic and interactive improvisational work using visual and auditory biofeedback data in real-time.
Jean Brazeau
Smashing a Circle into a Square
Sound
A selection of four home studio recordings dubbed together as one, produced with various software synthesizers and two reel-to-reel machines over the summer of 2020.
Charlie Cooper
The Neighborhood
Sound
Keeping within my newly limited boundaries, I set out with a few microphones and a natural radio receiver. I’m searching for cars, fish, insects, lightning, solar wind and whatever else I can find. I laugh at my measurements and marvel at what I miss.
“I am not a scientist. I explore the neighborhood.” – Annie Dillard
To listen to the audio, please visit www.charliecooper.co/the-neighborhood.
Karla Desentis Rodriguez
Latente
Video & Installation preview
The first part of this project is a six-minute video collage in landscape format, depicting twenty close-up frames of hands writing that, appearing consecutively, produce a crescendo of a sonic texture´s chorus. For illustrating the second part of this project, another video presents a preview of an architectural installation assembled with papers, which built an immersive environment designed through drawings (hand-coloured black-and-white) done by women`s participation on their view of the many forms of female violence and its global impact.
Aakansha Ghosh
Geographies of Home
Mixed Media & Video
These works are an attempt at understanding the complexity associated with the notion of defining and encountering places inside and outside through an intricate line of demarcation, a window. Geographies of Home is an exploration to visualize their invisible coexistence.
This is a research in progress, and each of these 4 projects are a part of this progress.
Please visit the page to view the projects: www.through-mywindow.com.
Somayeh Khakshoor
لا
This short piece—لا—is a diary based on conversations with the Moon and going through its phases, in an isolation period.
Initially it started to grow in me like massive, hard thorns on a massive, hard tree-like figure with an organic surface, while craving for bones; it was the manifestation of an irresistible yearning for a central structure. Yearning for the I-ness. The need to say “no” was against the forces outside; it was out of the necessity to define borders. It was as strong, as many, and as sharp as the teeth of a huge dragon. It had the power of all knives, daggers, swords. I instantly recognized it, it was لا: all starts with “no”. But then, as time went by, I remembered that it was also as the coral armature of any statuous structure, the fundamental pillars. It was bulky and hard, but not sharp anymore. Like a thousand-year-old tree. Then, it became soft, like each leaf’s tip or the shape of that lock of hair curling on the forehead, or all the delicate lines which move statically in miniatures to reflect tenderness. Then it became even softer, like the tip of ocean waves, or even more, almost immaterial like the ever-changing shapes made by smoke or flames of fire. It became the without, the only existing inexistent. It was now denial of the “I”. It was the form and its negation at the same time, it was the black light, the one and the zero, therefore all.
لا (lā) is an Arabic word, a combination of two letters ل (lām) and ا (aleph). The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters. لا is believed to be the 29th letter—which doesn’t exist. The word means no, not, and don’t.
(Please use headphones and consider it as a tentative draft version of an exploration of a work-in-progress ;) Thank you.)
Giselle Liu
Encounter Your Experience
Telematic Performance, Experimental Video
Encounter Your Experience, a work in progress, was an invitation into an international telematic choreographic process working with five beautiful dancers from Hong Kong and an audience from around the world. My research asks how movement uncovers our embodied interconnectedness with matter and energy.
Mansi Patel
In White Room
Installation
This project is a work in progress intended for the Informal Online Spring Show, ’20. In White Room is a part of my practice based research, continually experimenting and exploring light, natural and projected. Living a ‘new normal’ life, In White Room is a set of three time and site based installations. It began with an idea of how I perceive and introspect light movement over time in a space. In White Room is within my home and beyond my perceived visibility.
Here, showcasing my summer work in progress, and looking forward, the shift in the moment makes me think of the next process, in which I physically become a part of poetic gestures of the reflection stories I further create.
I work on artwork, and now art is working on me.
C. Olivia Valenza
field. notes.
field. notes. is a continued experiment investigating methods of score making. This research has taken place over the past few months and remains an ongoing chronicle of unexpected, roaming, constellated thought and sonic discovery. In seeking to encourage performances that access and amplify sounds personal to the performer, I wanted to return to methods of remediation in my score making process. Drawn to some very "musical" looking water coloured engravings of different grasses, I have played with the significance these illustrations hold for me as scores. I wanted to experiment with them, what would it be like to combine the graphical elements present with personal marks and notes of my own? In performing these scores, these elements help to ground myself in accessing what I feel is a personal sound during an improvisation. This sound can exist in the gaps pocketed between the already precedented graphic and text scores. There is a place where I can ruminate on memory and experience, loosely tethered to the train of thought elicited by thinking of my connections to these grasses, to their colours, shapes and histories; to a past or present, to here or there.
I have been lucky as well to share this research process with many friends, and I'm grateful for all those long walks, late-night calls, and compressed dialogues that have helped to get to the root of this work. Special thanks to Anthony D'Agostino who continues to share and explore these personal sounds with me and didn't bat an eye when I asked if he would play some tall oat grass in the name of research.
Faune Ybarra
Archive of Embodied Displacement
Archival materials and time-based media
I am a diasporic artist writing and making from Vancouver, coming from Newfoundland, but born and raised between Oaxaca and Mexico City. From constantly adapting to different landscapes, I’ve asked myself how and or if it’s even possible to lay roots as a non-native person when my transits resemble more those of the seeds of a dandelion. In this work-in-progress archive, I acknowledge times, places, and spaces of the so-called “Canadian” East and West coast, as I aim to claim some agency over my own journey, part of a shared history of immigration and displacement.
In the form of what I have come to call “diasporic gestures”, actions to ground oneself to the currently inhabited land, I sustain a conversation with the book Through Newfoundland with the Camera, published over 100 years ago, responding from the new land I’m trying to adapt to, Vancouver. My hope is for this archive to grow to include other times, places, people, and non-humans that can intimately delineate the connections between nuanced nationhood and the diasporic need of belonging to shifting territories.