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.

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!

Drop in at the Johnson Center Gold Room (next to Dewberry Hall) anytime between 11am-3pm on Thursday, March 21 for free food and fun activities as you learn more about Patriot Packout (PPO), Mason's annual donation initiative that collects new, like-new, and gently used items during move-out.

Patriot Packout 2024 is scheduled from April 15 – May 10 and there are many ways to participate this semester and over the summer!

Contribute to a mixed media collage entitled “Solidarity Through Sustainability” with everyday/found materials in partnership with Mason Exhibitions. All materials will be provided. Students are encouraged to bring Mason-branded items, knickknacks, and random, small creative items.

The Drop-In Social event will feature the following activities:

1. Explore volunteer opportunities on campus

2. Learn about available resources to meet basic needs

3. Contribute to a mixed media collage - bring your own items OR make things during the event

4. Bring donations for Patriot Pantry (dry goods, toiletries)

5. Enjoy vegan, vegetarian, and Halal food from local community kitchen, Anna Sudha

6. Enjoy Thai Tea and Vietnamese Coffee

Metamorphosis

Jennifer Lillis and Christopher Kardambikis

Joram Piatigorsky Gallery at The Writer’s Center
June 1 – August 28, 2023

In Metamorphosis, GMU Art and Design professors Jennifer Lillis and Christopher Kardambikis recast familiar, static forms from antiquity in the soft, accessible material of paper pulp. Through iteration and play, the artists re-collage and remix ancient myths and deities to craft a new, and newly strange, narrative space.

Metamorphosis re-mystifies an academic collection of seventy plaster casts – recording it while working to make it strange and new. Transmuting the original pieces into paper renders them newly weightless, slightly unmoored from their original context. The works are recast in a way that invites speculation and intervention.

Attend the closing artist talk on Sunday, August 27, 3-6pm.

RSVP: https://www.writer.org/event/metamorphosis-closing/