Live Performance at LOW END, Bemis Center for the Arts
Photo c. Ben Semisch
Julia Edith Rigby is an experimental sound artist, composer, and sculptor who thinks about entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena and sound. Her projects explore collaboration, cohabitation and interdependence with soniferous animals and environments, imagining futurities which complexify our relationships to sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and renewal, kinship and wonder, climate grief and climate futurities.
Rigby works with performance, sound, video, and multi-channel moving image installation to create multimedia ecosystems that explore the edges of our perception. Her projects ask questions about radical noticing, regenerative worldmaking, listening / sounding as social practice, shifting seascapes, multispecies relationships and sensory ecology.
Her performances hybridize live free improvisational instrumentation, amplified edited sound and field recordings, time-based media and community-activated performance that reconfigure the viewer / listener as performer. She works with field recordings, multichannel video and audio, and projection mapping to open our minds to more-than-human timescales and to introduce new ways of thinking about ecology and environmental relationships. She researches relationships among resonance and vibration, rupture and repair, degeneration and regeneration. What is the connection between the history of a site and its resonance, its acoustical signature? Between ecological, material and sonic decay? Can finding new ways to listen to and think about a site’s resonance catalyze new ways of thinking about more-than-human timescales or even accelerating geological timescales? What can we collectively learn about our rapidly changing world by finding new ways to experience listening? Can sound art help us ask new questions about a site and its history, about relationships with other living things and with our world?
Her projects span oceanic operas, harmonic and tonal experimentations on viola and pipe organ, and immersive multisensorial installations. Collaborating with found objects and found sites—sea caves, decomposing trees and waste sites for example—Rigby composes vibrant sound works that explore the sonic signatures of ecological systems and environmental phenomena 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. Can listening nurture new means of sensing and understanding the world around us? Can finding new ways to experience sounding and listening catalyze new ways of thinking about deep time, care, and human / more-than-human kinship?
Rigby works with acoustical architecture, animal vocalizations, string harmonics, interspecies collaboration, resonant space, metamorphosis, dissonance, waste streams and international ecosystems, ecotones, sustained sound, soniferous bodies and fever dreams. In her compositions, eroding sea caves transmogrify into megafaunal breathers. Tortoise exhalations sound the ocarina-like wind sections. Pyrocene-scarred elderflorae shape harmonic structures. Percussion arrives via woodpecker bills and sea star feet. Human and amphibian vocals, cathedral bells, wild parrots, and TSA field recordings flesh out the operatics. Pipe organs and violas converse with cicadas and crabs. Meetings with living fossils—Przewalski's horses and hagfish—guide the scoring of brass instrumentation on welded amalgamations of dump-scavenged, traumatized instruments. Rigby’s raucous compositions conjure worlds as lush visually as they are sonically, where acoustic and material decay and regeneration happen at superspeed in kalaidoscopic, ultrachromatic chaos. Butterflies nectar on rotting figs and scorpion fish parade in fluorescent pink. Moving imaginaries featuring blooming cacti, slithering eels, and respiring sharks lay the foundation for acoustical imaginaries which in turn lay the foundation for future imaginaries, worlds which call into question ideas like: what does it mean to share physical and acoustical space with a vibrant spectrum of more-than-humans living on this planet? Where do we end, and where does the world begin? What do those liminal spaces sound like?
Julia Edith Rigby has performed at / composed for LEAF Festival in Lafayette, Colorado (2024), LOW End in Omaha, Nebraska (2023), the Toulouse Theater in New Orleans (2023), SAPPYFEST in New Brunswick (2024) and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida (2023). She is a recipient of artist grants from the LA County Department of Arts and Culture, Arts New Brunswick, 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 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. She recently exhibited her solo show Fever Dream at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana and is about to premiere her first live opera on the roof of the Bendix Building in Los Angeles. Rigby plays viola, pipe organ, and sound sculptures.