Live Performance at LOW END, Bemis Center for the Arts
Photo c. Ben Semisch
Live Performance at LOW END, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
Photo c. Ben Semisch
Produced at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art by Think Motion Video, 2024
Julia Edith Rigby is an experimental sound artist, composer, and sculptor who thinks about entanglements among people, landscapes, animals and sound. Her projects explore collaboration, cohabitation and interdependence with more-than-humans.
She works with found materials and found sites to explore phenomena, perception and sense of place. She is curious about acoustical, climatic and environmental phenomena in relation to polyphony (specifically bioacoustical melodies) and phenology (the study of seasonal natural phenomena), and the ways that we perceive these relationships somatically.
Her current projects include oceanic operas, immersive multisensorial installations and interactive, site-responsive sound sculptures that explore sonic signatures of particular sites in ways that render audible the inaudible, bring us into relation with sounds previously un-hearable and unheard, and expand our human-centered understanding of perception / worlding to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans.
Her performances hybridize live free improvisational instrumentation—often leading with pipe organ and viola—amplified edited sound, and community-activated performance. She works with field recordings, welded brass sound sculptures, multichannel video and audio, and projection mapping to open our minds to different timescales, introduce new ways of thinking about environmental relationships and new ways of listening, and queer socioecological histories and futurities. She researches relationships among resonance and history, ecological and sonic decay, degeneration and regeneration. Her work asks questions about radical noticing and regenerative worldmaking, multispecies relationships, acoustical architecture, and ambisonic sound.
Julia Edith Rigby (b. 1990, USA) has performed at LEAF Festival in Lafayette, Colorado (2024), LOW End in Omaha, Nebraska (2023), and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida (2023). She is a recipient of artist grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. She was the Sound Art + Experimental Music Fellow at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska in fall 2023. She has been an artist in residence at GlougauAIR Artist Residency in Berlin, PLAYA Summer Lake, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Kala Art Institute, and others. Rigby has exhibited work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Berlin. Rigby received her MFA in Studio Art at the University of California, Davis (2020), where she was a recipient of the Mary Lou Osborn Award and the Fay Nelson Award.