#lecture 9

In relation with the website content, a lot of architecture photographs were often taken in certain artistic framing since most of the building structure were symmetrical or otherwise the attached objects (such as windows) were repetitive, therefore the majority and of course the main goal of architecture photography is to showcase the beauty of the structure. Its beauty is coming from significant form, in many cases the visual aspects was more important than the meaning of the building, unless the artist tends to tell stories behind the building or even make it as pure documentary.

I don’t want to think about this.

Nikita’s lecture for me comes back to fundamentals in poetry. In poetry, one of the way we understand a poem is by analyzing what the poet is withholding and disclosing. Nikita has found agency as an artist through these things - she withholds, she’s opaque. Nikita was a great note to end on for this semester because these last couple of months, I’ve really been struggling with the concept of withholding. I’m much more of a discloser/explainer/over-sharerer and my theatre practice things, I’ve been struggling with the concept of play. I  struggle with indirectness. I struggle with letting things sit. This semester was about becoming comfortable with the unknown; the opaque. Not everything is going to be accessible to me, not everything is meant to be accessible to me, not everything is meant to be accessible, period. And that interesting and important and unsettling and something I need to explore more as an artist, but seeing Nikita’s work let me be okay with the opaque. 

Nikita Gale

Nikita Gale

Nikita Gale

In this recorded sound work performance, a trumpet  one type of musical horn –  imitates car-related sounds; this performance comprises a series of perceptual shifts between figure and ground within an automotive soundscape – keynote or ground sounds (the hum of a motor) are speckled with soundmarks (the sound of screeching tires, the sound of a transmission shifting gears) and, in some moments within the composition, drift entirely into signals (the sound of a siren, the sound of an engine blowing out). Influenced by post-modern sound art and jazz of the 60s, the performance is consistently punctuated by the soundmark of breaths taken to continue playing the trumpet – a constant but mostly unconsciously experienced sign of the presence and limitations of the body in the process of producing the work itself. All of these sounds coalesce and disperse to produce a sonic landscape that oscillates between images of crashes, racing, bodies, and scenic transcendent drives.