Julia Edith Rigby

Image:

Still from Fever Dream

2024

Multi-channel video, multi-speaker audio, duration 28 minutes, 44 seconds, continuous loop. Video Still.

OPENING RECEPTION:

Saturday, June 1 2024, 7-10pm

Location: Grand Central Art Center

LIVE PERFORMANCE:

Saturday, June 1 2024, 8 pm

Location: Grand Central Art Center

ARTIST LECTURE:

EXHIBTION:

June 1—August 11, 2024

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Julia Edith Rigby is an experimental sound artist, composer, and sculptor who thinks about entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena and sound.

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 ruptured polyphonies (specifically bioacoustical melodies) and phenologies (seasonal natural phenomena). Her projects explore ways that we perceive these relationships somatically, asking questions about radical noticing and regenerative worldmaking, climate and humanities, multispecies relationships and sensory ecology.

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. Acoustical architecture, ambisonic sound, animal vocalizations, string harmonics, resonant space, soniferous bodies and fever dreams are some of the things she’s thinking about.

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 projects explore collaboration, cohabitation and interdependence with soniferous animals, environments and phenomena.

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 recently awarded an artist residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in central Oregon. Rigby 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.

ABOUT THE WORK

Fever Dream invites us to think about resonance, multispecies relationships, and entanglements among people, landscapes, animals and sound. The project explores entanglements among organisms, oceanscapes and climatic phenomena.

Sourcing field recordings from sea caves, atmospheric river events, decomposing trees and wild animals, the opera brings us into relation with sounds previously un-hearable and unheard, expanding our human-centered understanding of perception / world-making to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans.

Field recordings include wild bats, cerambycid beetles, scarab beetles, bees, Galapagos sea lion pups and tortoises, tree frogs and crickets, cicadas and sea storms, soniferous fish and marine isopods.

Ocean soundscapes were recorded via hydrophone during an atmospheric river storm event in California. A bulk of the oceanic video and audio featured in the project was collected during various atmospheric river storm events—in real time underwater as well as afterwards in the form of washed up detritus and decay.

Frog calls were recorded in Californian vernal pools, Midwest ponds, and a Costa Rican cloud forest undergoing climate change-exacerbated amphibian decline. Woodpecker / squirrel / ash recorded in a wildfire burn site in Oregon six months after an unseasonal firestorm event. Iceberg soundscapes were collected in eastern Greenland. A tortoise breathing and eating wild guava was recorded on Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos. Church bells were recorded in Berlin and Oaxaca.

Bugling tule elks—which sound like A string harmonics—in northern California guided the compositions with viola harmonics.

Sounds recorded at the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute's Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega, California include the radula of a predacious snail drilling through a mussel shell, a sea urchin walking on glass, and hagfish feeding on decomposing fish. Hungry starfish were recorded inching across glass bowls, hunting mussels.

The project experiments with expanding our senses of perception to consider different understandings of time and worldmaking, sounding and sensing. Sensory worlds of various animals are explored. For instance, starfish tube feet recordings are not just recordings of their feet. They are recordings of their hydraulically-operated suction cups, which are not just locomoting, but also tasting and smelling for food. And they are also recordings of their eyes, which are located on the tips of their arms.

Recordings of echolocating bats open our ears to means of sensing via pulse and echo.

Buzzing cicadas reveal a world of sounding reliant on tympanal vibration and abdominal resonance.

The kangaroo rat sequence contemplates rat vocalizations, viola harmonics, and the concept of more-than-human communication and worldmaking. Rats communicate in ultrasonic frequencies beyond our human range of hearing. Few studies however have been performed on ultrasonic kangaroo rat vocalizations. The viola elements of this sequence experiment with harmonic tone vibrations and variations to image myriad potential manifestations of these vocalizations if brought down into the realm of audible frequencies.

Acoustical imaginings flesh out the bulk of the score. Pipe organ swells, viola harmonics, brass drones and irreverent vocals make sonic conjectures of the perceptual worlds of whale sharks and leopard lizards, toadfish and butterflies. The score dreams worlds for a rainbow of queer existences too, from gay penguins to genderfluid fish to gender-free comb jellies and earthworms. Earthworms are agents of decay, renewal and sexual fluidity, possessing both female and male reproductive organs.

We know what queer ecology looks like. But what does it / could it sound like? Conjectures multiply. How might acoustical imaginings and sensory ecologies, ontology and phenomenology, decay and climate anxiety relate? What are some more-than-human epistemologies we can consider when thinking about how other animals, plants, and fungi sense and signal to their worlds? What could be a sonic imagining—and sonic implication—of ocean acidification? Of climate change-exacerbated wildfire activity? What is the life cycle of climate grief? What is the natural history of a fever dream?

Field recordings of animal vocalizations are arranged with recordings of sonified sea caves. These sea cave recordings aim to open our ears to relationships between resonance and history, sculptural processes and geologic time. Various cave sites are temporarily activated by wires stretched across the interiors of caves and played with cello bows. The project consumed the life span of four bows, each played until the hairs had all been shredded. Bowing the wires allows us to hear a cave’s range of resonance, its unique acoustical architecture. The activations render audible the inaudible, bringing us into relation with sounds previously un-hearable and unheard. This recording project, called Sea Cave Complex, spans three years’ worth of experimentation with sonic and material decay as influenced by shifts in tides, cave apertures, and storm events.

Sea Cave Complex features local sea caves located roughly twenty miles away from the Grand Central Art Center. By bringing local cave sounds into conversation with sounds from places like Greenland, the Galapagos, Los Angeles, and Berlin, the project aims to cultivate relational thinking about socioenvironmental phenomena on local and global scales. The installation was temporary and left no trace on the sea caves or the surrounding environment.

An ancient juniper tree also plays into the score. Visuals and sounds recorded from the project Soniferous Juniper are featured throughout the installation. The project transformed a 1200+ year old juniper tree growing just two hours north of the Grand Central Art Center into a living cello. Copper wires stretched across a fire-carved doorway in the tree are activated with a cello bow, with the tree itself acting as the resonant body for the wires’ vibrations.

The cellulose fibers of the tree contribute to a highly-individualized sonic signature. When we hear the vibrations of these fibers—still living but heavily scarred by climate-exacerbated wildfire events—we are hearing the acoustical anatomy of a tree, the resonance of centuries of climatic phenomena acting upon an organism. The installation was temporary and left no trace on the tree or the environment.

These two particular projects experiment with thinking about growth and decay, decomposition and re-composition—of a musical note, of a juniper tree, of a sea cave—on larger-than-human and even geological timescales. What does listening to growth and decay on larger-than-human timescales do for our thinking about phenomena?

Many of the sounds and visuals in Fever Dream were created with the sound sculpture Brass Tide, which can be viewed in the main gallery space. Sourcing material from traumatized instruments and brass objects salvaged from waste streams and flea markets, Rigby welded the piece in the Okada Sculpture and Ceramic Facility at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. Rigby performed live with the sound sculpture along with Zosha Warpeha and Chris Williams at LOW END in the fall in Omaha, Nebraska.

Soundscapes and video footage from the performance Gill Valves are also present in this piece. Gill Valves was performed at The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska and features a pipe organ. This was a community-activated performance, in which audience members were invited to sit back-to-back with the organ and experience sound on a seismic scale via bone conduction.

Gill Valves experiments with more-than-human means of listening, moving beyond the realm of cochlear vibration into the realm of bone conduction. Taking cues from elephants—who communicate via low-frequency rumbles heard through their fatty, sensitive feet—and baleen whales—who communicate long distance via low-frequency calls and amplify infrasonic sounds via their unique skull morphologies—the project aims to cultivate new ways of listening via flesh contact with the organ body.

People were invited to engage with the pipe organ, to contribute to the soundscape via their movements and interactions, to contemplate sound production and pipe organ as proto-subwoofer, and to observe the ways our spatial movements shaped not just our perception of the soundscape but also the very nature and creation of that soundscape.

The project catalyzed transformations by which the viewers / listeners became the performers, creating a space for collective listening and collective improvisation. How might these kinds of actions with a pipe organ—this megafaunal, multi-esophageal screamer—create space for imagining collective grief processes and political actions?

Rigby performed the parts for piano, viola, vocals, and pipe organ. Many of the viola elements were recorded during a performance this fall at The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska and hybridize live free improvisational instrumentation with amplified edited sound.

Kafele Williams played the trumpet elements, and The Wrinkles in Time Brass Band played horns and percussion.

Fever Dream opens June 1 with a live performance at 8 pm. The performance hybridizes live free improvisational instrumentation—leading with viola and the sound sculpture Brass Tide—live vocals, and amplified edited sound (featuring the field recordings described in this essay).

Many thanks to Grand Central Art Center and Cal State University, Fullerton for supporting this project.