On Tuesday April 21, 2020 in a special one hour show from 11:00 a.m. to noon PST Joseph Gallivan interviews Theo Downes-Le Guin of Upfor Gallery about Danielle Roney’s show Frequencies of Opacity. Le Guin talks about how Roney translated recorded voices of undocumented Americans into light patterns and 3D printed sculptures, and how she created a five Nest cam surveillance sculpture whose video feed is only available to one person, a mysterious undocumented worker in the Midwest.
The show has been extended through May 15, 2020 because of the coronavirus lockdown, although the gallery is still open by appointment.
FROM THE PRESS RELEASE:
Online: website and Artsy
March 5 – April 30, 2020
In Frequencies of Opacity, artist Danielle Roney presents three bodies of work developed through research and community engagement around contemporary migrant experiences. Migration patterns, immigration policy, and migrant and refugee experiences have been the focus of Roney’s work for the last two decades, the center of a practice rooted in nomadic research and the impact of technology on society. Her recent works are poetic visualizations expressing resilient affirmations of strength in difference.
Whispers are 3D printed sculptures formed by algorithmically interpreting vocal recordings of readings by and about migrants, intended to embody the physical intimacy of a whisper. Strata Series: Zero and Strata Series: Zero-One are light-based sculptures, the first in an ongoing series, that translates biofeedback and voice data recorded by migrant collaborators into visual patterns. Finally, PUBLICS is a live-streaming camera network accessible only to a migrant collaborator, turning the table on surveillance culture and the norms of art viewership.
This exhibition reprises and builds on Roney’s recent participation in knowledges at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. It was curated by Joey Orr, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator for Research, as part of the Integrated Arts Research Initiative and funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Occupying Institutional Spaces through Immateriality
To understand and embrace opacity is to claim the sovereignty of self. To live in difference. To evolve in relation to the experiences of exchange. Negating Otherness for totality†. Migration is a human right to survival as a part of nature and being in the world. The fractal order of Glissant’s chaos-monde.††
When our bodily presence, in and of itself, is criminalized and the borderlands of institutionalized spaces have collapsed, how does the ‘illegal’ migrant occupy these spaces?
We must support an irreducible legitimacy, as a means of liberation, sustaining a multiplicity of potentials through interfaces of exchange and thus intersubjectivity. By leveraging immateriality as a strategy of human freedom, we create portals perforating these spaces, where autonomous algorithms empower virtual culture to create radical vehicles of ethnography.
As a series of parallel futures and histories, “self” within a migrant condition is emphasized through layered proximities. Simultaneous, bifurcating movements redefine the spatial relationship of encounters, where time and space are deconstructed and our fragmented reality is negotiated through the lens of a participatory state of exile.
The rhizomatic perspective of these vehicles embraces a personal addressal beyond critique, where from positions of power and beauty, self-determinacy may form in generous and genuine ways.
† Glissant, Edouard., Poetics of Relation. (AnnArbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2010) xv. Translator Betsy Wing, interprets Glissant’s identities of the world; totalite-monde, to be concrete and quantifiable.
†† See Glissant (2010), chaos-monde, referring to spiraling and redundant trajectories. Noting echos-monde as the third world identity, feedback.
To hear previous episodes of this show or any of our KBOO public affairs programming, just go to KBOO dot F-M or listen on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Joseph Gallivan has been a reporter since 1990. He has covered music for the London Independent, Technology for the New York Post, and arts and culture for the Portland Tribune, where he is currently the Business Reporter. He is the author of two novels, "Oi, Ref!" and "England All Over" which are available on Amazon.com
This show was recorded at Upfor Gallery on April 17, 2020, in an appropriately standoffish manner with face masks and rubber gloves.
- KBOO