ACOUSTIC RESONANCE

Visual artists, like musicians, have used sound as a medium to shape and construct, and in so doing have sought to transform a viewer-listener’s experience. Sound can provoke memory, communicate across barriers, claim a space, or transform a city. The works in ACOUSTIC RESONANCE reflect on sound as a medium and tool of transformation and power. Imagery, objects, and installations reveal the potent qualities of sound art in our cultural landscape today.

Artists: Ryan Adams, Raven Chacon, John Fireman, Matt Joynt + Josh Rios + Anthony Romero, Angel Nevarez + Valerie Tevere, Andrea Ray, Julianne Swartz, Audra Wolowiec

ACOUSTIC RESONANCE is organized by Director of Exhibitions, Julie Poitras Santos in collaboration with Steve Drown, Coordinator of the Bob Crewe Program in Art & Music, and supported in part by grants from the Crewe Foundation and the Onion Foundation. 

Maine College of Art Visiting Artist Series in conjunction with ACOUSTIC RESONANCE
Funded through the generous support of the Gene R. Cohen Charitable Foundation.

Raven Chacon: October 7
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, and Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal. He has received the Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition.

Matt Joynt, Josh Rios, Anthony Romero: October 21
Matt Joynt is a Chicago-based composer and artist whose work engages the multivalent political histories of sound, sonic archives, and sound as site. His composition projects for film have premiered at Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival and IFC New York. Josh Rios is a media artist, writer, and educator whose projects deal with the histories, archives, and futurities of Latinx subjectivity and US/Mexico relations as understood through globalization and neocoloniality. Recent projects and presentations have been featured at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and Blue Star Contemporary. Anthony Romero is a Boston-based artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting artists and communities of color. He is co-founder of the Latinx Artist Visibility Award and cofounder of the Latinx Artists Retreat. He is Professor of the Practice at the SMFA at Tufts University, Boston and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Andrea Ray: October 28
Andrea Ray has a cross-disciplinary art practice which includes writing, installation, and sound. Focusing on the possibility of collapsing time through affective contact between history and people, Ray’s work seeks to create an open position from which a subject is placed in the possibility of dreaming of a fresh ground of resistance. Ray has exhibited at Sculpture Center, Apex Art, P.S.1 Clocktower Gallery, and White Columns in New York; and Wanås Foundation in Sweden. Ray is an Art Matters Fellow and is a two-time recipient of NYFA Fellowships. 

Julianne Swartz: November 11
Julianne Swartz’s sculptures transmute sound to be both visual and tactile. The energy of sound is dispersed through materials such as paper and wire translating a score of recognizable and unfamiliar sounds to vibration and gesture. Swartz has exhibited her sound works at deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Mass MoCA, Islip Art Museum, and Tang Museum. She has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Anonymous Was A Woman.

Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere: December 2
Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere are interdisciplinary artists whose practice spans over eighteen years of projects that actuate music and sound, radio, dissent, and the cultural complexities of the public sphere. Nevarez and Tevere have exhibited and screened their work at The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, Creative Time, and New Museum. They have received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, Harpo Foundation, Art Matters, and National Endowment for the Arts.

The ICA at MECA is an integral part of the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) curriculum at Maine College of Art. Visit meca.edu/mfa to learn more.