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accessadultsperformances

SoVISA Galactic: Listening through Space

Friday, Jun 15, 2018 | 2–4pm

ADMISSION: Free and open to the public. To register, email access@thecjm.org.

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2018-06-15 14:00:00 UTC2018-06-15 16:00:00 UTC America/Los_AngelesThe CJM - 736 Mission St, San Francisco, CASoVISA Galactic: Listening through SpaceArtists Andy Slater and Fayen d’Evie invite you to join them on a sonar wayfinding journey, from the outer architecture of The Contemporary Jewish Museum (The CJM) to the Museum’s Blue Cube space. The performance will include a sculptural contribution from Bay Area artist Jennifer Justice. Following the performance, the artists will share their ambitions for SoVISA, the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists, a group founded by Andy Slater advocating for the inclusion of sound art in art education for the blind, and a greater presence in museums.

Artists Andy Slater and Fayen d’Evie invite you to join them on a sonar wayfinding journey, from the outer architecture of The Contemporary Jewish Museum (The CJM) to the Museum’s Blue Cube space. The performance will include a sculptural contribution from Bay Area artist Jennifer Justice.

Following the performance, the artists will share their ambitions for SoVISA, the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists, a group founded by Andy Slater advocating for the inclusion of sound art in art education for the blind, and a greater presence in museums. They will share examples from their solo projects, including Space for the Overactive Ear and The Radical Potential of Blindness and current collaborations that traverse extraterrestrial listening sites and haunted panopticon prisons.

SoVisa technical advisors include Josh Miele (sonic technologies) and Sheri Wells-Jensen (xenolinguistics).

The CJM is thrilled to host this performance as a way to generate new pathways for creating access to The Museum. This initiative is part of an ongoing series that highlights the creativity and ingenuity of artists who are stretching our understanding of disability, access, and art in progressive and unexpected ways.

Co-sponsored by Bay Area Arts Access Collective (BAAAC), a volunteer-run network of arts and cultural workers, disability advocates, artists, and educators who are dedicated to enhancing access to the Bay Area’s arts and cultural sector for people with disabilities.

Image description: Myopic crops of tactile screenprints with debossing, in tones of purple, lime green, and shades of white. From an ongoing series by Fayen d'Evie (2017–). Printed by Trent Walter, Negative Press. Image translation from photographic documentation by Pippa Samaya, recalling the exhibition From One Body to Another by Sophie Takách and Fayen d'Evie with Janaleen Wolfe, Ben Phillips and Bryan Phillips, at Casula Powerhouse, 2017.

Community Partner

The Bay Area Arts Access Collective (BAAAC) is a volunteer-run network of arts and cultural workers, disability advocates, artists, and educators who are dedicated to enhancing access to the Bay Area’s arts and cultural sector for people with disabilities. Through professional development workshops, BAAAC provides a forum for sharing best practices and resources around making Bay Area cultural organizations more accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities, as audience members, artists, and culture-makers.

Accessibility

The Museum is wheelchair and mobility device accessible. We ask that attendees refrain from wearing fragrances in an effort to maintain a scent-free environment. Sign language interpretation can be requested with at least one week notice by emailing access@thecjm.org or by calling 415.655.7856 (relay calls welcome). FM assistive listening devices and microphones for sound enhancement will be provided for the post-performance discussion.

Accessibility Info
about the peformers
Image description: A mirrored image of Andy Slater standing back to back to himself, with his reflection duplicated into two mirrors on either side of the image. Tones of amber and yellow light emanate from the lights on either side of the mirrors. Slater is wearing a black turtleneck shirt.
Andy Slater

Image description: A mirrored image of Andy Slater standing back to back to himself, with his reflection duplicated into two mirrors on either side of the image. Tones of amber and yellow light emanate from the lights on either side of the mirrors. Slater is wearing a black turtleneck shirt.

Andy Slater is a legally blind musician, sound artist, author, and performer. He is a 2018 3Arts/Bodies Of Work fellow at the University Of Illinois Chicago and Institutional Incubation Artist at High Concept Labs. His sonic work has always been informed by blindness but it wasn’t until recently that he introduced the subject of disability into his work. In 2016, after an unsuccessful search for blind noisemakers, Slater founded the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists (SoVISA), a group advocating for the inclusion of sound art in art education for the blind and a greater presence in museums and institutions. SoVISA has developed training for accessible audio recording through the Sound As Sight project. The group offers grants for studio access, exhibition and performance opportunities, and a supportive network of fellow members. As part of his residency at High Concept Labs, Slater has worked to develop the SoVISA manifesto. He began by introducing Sound As Sight, a field recording project where blind participants record the world around them and encourage the exploration of their unique relationships with sound. The first completed work was Slater’s Inside Mana Contemporary (2017). The piece was created from sounds recorded on the Mana campus using accessible audio technology. Sound As Sight received a grant from the Cliff Dwellers Club helping fund the project’s development in 2018.

Due to Slater’s visual impairment his ears function as navigation, safety, and problem solving tools. Because of this, he listens with great detail and focus, making it hard not to listen critically. Slater began composing experimental music as a teen in the early 90s. He moved to Chicago in 1994 to attend classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Sound Department. After a decade away from school he returned in 2010 to complete his education. He graduated from SAIC in 2013 with a BFA focusing on sound composition and sonic art. During his 2018 3Arts residency at UIC, Slater will work to realize some of SoVISA’s goals through Sound As Sight workshops and training, public listening projects, and leading discussions on museum accessibility. His latest work in progress, A Space For The Overactive Ear, is a multichannel sound installation composed of field recordings created with accessible IOS recording technology. Slater has a large catalog of recorded music dating back 30 years that includes robotic synthesizer music, art-metal, acid-rock, musique-concrete, as well as film scores and sound design. He currently heads the experimental funk septet, the Velcro Lewis Group. Slater is an engineer at Chicago’s Frogg Mountain Recording studio and will barter his services for pizza and beer.

Image description: Fayen d’Evie pictured from the chest up with her gaze oriented towards the side, and her hand grasping a metal rod attached to a tan colored animal hide. Image from the durational exhibition […] {…} […] HANDOVERS + TRANSLATIONS, Fayen d'Evie, Troy McConnell, Sophie Takách and Prue Lang, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne, 8–29 Oct 2016.
Fayen d'Evie

Image description: Fayen d’Evie pictured from the chest up with her gaze oriented towards the side, and her hand grasping a metal rod attached to a tan colored animal hide. Image from the durational exhibition […] {…} […]  HANDOVERS + TRANSLATIONS, Fayen d'Evie, Troy McConnell, Sophie Takách and Prue Lang, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne, 8–29 Oct 2016.

Fayen d'Evie is an artist, writer, and curator based in Muckleford, Australia. Her projects are often conversational and collaborative, and resist spectatorship by activating diverse audiences in embodied readings of artworks. d'Evie advocates the radical potential for blindness. By agitating ocularcentric norms of exhibition-making, she argues that blindness offers critical positions and methods for artistic and curatorial practice attuned to sensory translations, ephemerality, vibrational poetics, the tangible and intangible, hallucination, concealment, uncertainty, and the invisible. With artist Katie West, d'Evie co-founded the Museum Incognita, which revisits neglected, concealed, or obscured histories, activates embodied readings, and archives ephemeral artworks and practices. d'Evie is also the founder of 3-ply, which investigates artist-led publishing as an experimental site for the creation, dispersal, translation, and archiving of texts. Since 2017, d'Evie has been collaborating with the SFMOMA Artist Initiative to explore how performative, ephemeral and degrading artworks can be sensed, archived, conserved, and remembered through creative practice. This project evolved out of research in 2016 with Georgina Kleege and Devon Bella at KADIST on haptic dialogue and how audiodescription may be approached as an artistic and literary form. d'Evie is currently a Phd candidate in curatorial practice at Monash University.

Jennifer Justice

Image description: Head shot of a woman with wavy blonde hair and a big smile cast in a funky red glow.

Jennifer Justice is a multimedia artist, writer, and educator, whose art practice explores the epistemologies that shape understanding of disability, technology, science, and art. She develops speculative sculptural environments that invite multi-sensory, performative encounters with handmade, machined, and computer-generated artifacts. Her work has been exhibited at StoreFrontLab and the African American Cultural Center in San Francisco, the Chicago Cultural Center, Zolla/ Lieberman Gallery, and the Birmingham Museum of Art. 

Josh Miele

Image description: Photo of Josh Miele, a white man with curly brown hair. He has a blue left eye and scars covering his face and right eye. He is smiling at the camera and wearing a blue sweater. He is outside with greenery in the background.

Josh Miele is Associate Director of Technology Research and Development, Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Low Vision and Blindness, Smith Kettlewell Eye REsearch Institute. He is a blind scientist, designer, and educator with decades of active involvement in the world of technology, accessibility, and disability. His work in information accessibility has impacted technologies including screen readers, auditory displays, audio/tactile maps and graphics, wayfinding, braille input, video description, and STEM education. 

Sheri Wells-Jensen

Image description: Photo of Sheri Wells-Jensen, a woman smiling with her head tilted slightly upwards towards the light.

Sheri Wells-Jensen is an associate professor in the Department of English at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. She is on the board of directors of METI International. Her research interests include psycholinguistics, xenolinguistics, phonetics, braille, language preservation, TESOL, language creation, astrobiology and disability studies. In 2018, she was co-chair of the SETI/METI Panel on Communication, Semiotics and Linguistics, at the International Space Development Conference. Recent presentations include  Beware the blind aliens: They come to eat your hypotheses and Things you didn't see because you were looking: Blind aliens, science and interspecies miscommunication.

supporters

Access Programs are made possible by major support from Wells Fargo Foundation. Additional generous support is provided by The Morse Family Foundation.

Image Credit

Header image: From an ongoing series by Fayen d'Evie (2017-). Printed by Trent Walter, Negative Press. Image translation from photographic documentation by Pippa Samaya, recalling the exhibition From One Body to Another by Sophie Takách and Fayen d'Evie with Janaleen Wolfe, Ben Phillips and Bryan Phillips, at Casula Powerhouse, 2017. Bios: Andy Slater photo by the artist; Fayen Devie photo by Pippa Samaya; Jennifer Justice photo by the artist; Josh Miele photo courtesy of the artist; Sheri Wells-Jensen photo courtesy of the artist.