Join us on Wednesday, April 24 at 4:30pm in the Sculpture Yard of the Art and Design Building for 'The Caged Bird Screams' for Noise Awareness Day 2024. Noise Awareness 2024 fully combines taught moments with experimental opportunities. It brings together artists to engage in the ways sound art and visual art can transcend space, borders, and carcerality and explore themes of isolation, destruction, and transformation.
Photo: Courtesy Maria Gaspar
Artist Maria Gaspar will share her sonic sculpture, ‘We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (After Angela Davis)’, a series of iron cell bars salvaged from the deconstructed Cook County Jail in Chicago, to be transfigured into an experimental experience through touch and vibrations.
Professor Thomas Stanley’s Sound Art students have developed artworks incorporating the sounds from ‘We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (After Angela Davis)’, which will be mixed into an original performance by Professor Stanley and percussionist Jamal Moore.
Professor Brian Davis and his Advanced Sculpture students will present a collaborative kinetic sculpture in response to the work of Stephanie Mercedes.
All of this emerged from the Faces of Resilience exhibitions in Fairfax during Fall 2023 and Arlington during Spring 2024.
About Noise Awareness:
The Center for Hearing and Communication (CHC) founded International Noise Awareness Day (INAD) in 1996. This yearly event encourages people to minimize bothersome noise where they work, live, and play. In 2010, Professor Thomas Stanley encouraged his Sound Art (AVT 374) students to expand NAD’s focus on safe listening practices to include a deep engagement with listening as a process of self and social inquiry.
Mason's Noise Awareness all-night concert (noise-a-thon) and related activities became an important part of the audio arts calendar in the DC area and an opportunity to interrogate the arbitrary designation of new and experimental music as noise.
From 2010-2017, Stanley and the students of AVT 374 presented a campus-wide observance of Noise Awareness Day that celebrated hearing and encouraged encounters with the socially and sonically unfamiliar.
NOISE AWARENESS 2024/The Caged Bird Screams marks the first on-campus celebration since the pandemic!