Congratulations, Alexandra Spence
Recent SCA MFA grad Alexandra Spence has been selected out of an "international open call" by "an esteemed panel of judges including sound artists Janek Schaefer, Annie Mahtani and publisher of The Wire, Tony Herrington" to be part of The Engine Room 2017: International Sound Art Exhibition, which "celebrates the most exciting sound art being produced right now by emerging artists from across the world." Spence's winning installation work, Listening to the sea from at least twelve points of hearing, is now on display at the Morley Gallery in London, UK.
Spence also presented Listening to the sea from at least twelve points of hearing as part of her work in her MFA Graduating Exhibition, will today be like yesterday – will yesterday be like tomorrow, at the Audain Gallery in 2016, which she contextualized like this:
In this work I made twelve field recordings, one at each of Vancouver’s beaches, using a portable cassette player and hand-built tape loops. Each tape loop ribbon was removed from the cassette casing and buried in the location at which it was recorded. One to three months later they were dug up and placed back into cassettes. The obvious result is the physical deterioration of the tape, and degradation of the original recordings. And yet the deterioration of one thing is a transformation into another.
I decided to bury the tape to see how it might be affected by changes in temperature, the magnetism of the earth, as well as moisture and scratches from dirt and earth. Not only are the sounds of waves and wind recorded, the sand and dirt is embedded and etched into the tape too and thus affects the sound of the audio recording.
Listening… is also an attempt at collaboration, asking and prompting a place to affect its own sounding. Burying the tape seemed to give the places at which I was recording and burying a sense of autonomy over their own soundings. I imagined this as a collaboration of sorts – I made a recording and the physical variables of each place and location altered it. The decision to bury tape at each of Vancouver’s beaches became a way for me to connect the place I was in to the place I was from.
Find out more about Alexandra Spence at her website: alexandraspence.net.