Exhibitions
Migration Parade, 2022
Penticton, BC/Montreal, QC
Luna Arts Festival, September 2022
Penticton Art Gallery, March 2022
Island Mountain Arts Gallery, 2019
Born in the fall of 2018, “Migration Parade” is an evolving, collaborative body of work and multimedia gallery installation by electroacoustic sound artist, Danielle Savage, and sculptural textile artist, Alexandra Goodall.
This work is an act of earnest research into the phenomena of hive-mind, relational space, and collective intelligence, from the micro to the macro, starting with ourselves. Through multiple research streams and creation methods, we are using the artistic disciplines of sculptural textile and electroacoustic composition to explore the movements of personal and collective bodies. We have drawn on the field of phenomenology, philosophically and through application, and rely on direct engagement with materials (cloth/fibre and raw sonic experimentation) to guide much of our studio practice. Simultaneously, we continue to follow and nurture the conceptual dimensions of our work, tracking how this evolves and how it provides further context, shaping and insight to our inquiry.
View the full Project Outline.
PAINTING A PICTURE OF THE FINAL INSTALLATION:
When visitors enter the exhibition space, they are met with nine large-scale white sculptures, hanging from the ceiling, arranged in a circle. The room is dark except for the sculptural pieces, which are subtly lit from above and below. Each piece is made of many hand-made, felted components. The color-palette of the exhibition is taken from the natural white wool used for the felt which imparts a soft, warm lustre indicative of bone, cocoons and animal hair. These sculptural pieces are intentionally ambiguous, leaning towards associations of eggs, cells, spindles, cicadas, seed pods and hives. The hope is that they are evocative, yet don’t instruct the participant how to feel. Rather, they invite engagement and inquiry.
Motion sensors embedded in the felt are triggered by the participants’ movement, setting off a multi-part sound work, which plays through speakers housed in the sculptures. This allows participants to feel how their presence impacts the space. The composed sounds swirl in hive-minded, primal patterns: swells, flocks, assembly and dispersal, on a spectrum from textural to gestural. The tone of the space implies a mass devotional conversation, at once alien and familiar, contemporary and primordial. It expresses the current milieu of human interventions with all their complicated outcomes and processes.
COLLABORATIONS:
Migration Parade started as a two-person collaboration between myself and Danielle Savage. Over the last 3 1/2 years, our themes and research called us to expand by engaging in 4 additional collaborations which spiraled off the central hub of our installation. We asked these artists to respond to our work through their mediums, and in so doing, create a work that is a whole unto itself.
“Migration Parade: Helical Song” by choreographer, Charlie Prince, was performed from March 27th - April 3rd, 2022, at the Penticton Art Gallery in the “Migration Parade: Holon” Exhibition. Learn about "Migration Parade: Helical Song".
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Cinematographer and Director, Kristen Brown, created an artist portrait film, 'The Mirror of Others', that followed Charlie Prince in the process, development and performance of “Migration Parade: Helical Song”.
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Photographer and visual artist, Winona Rae, is creating a body of work around our studio process and the sculptures. View a sample of Winona's work with us here.
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Performance Artist and vocalist, Mia Harris, conducted the research project “VIMES Interaction” (Vocal Improvisation and Motion-activated Electroacoustic Sound Interaction) from April 23rd to 30th, 2022, at the Penticton Art Gallery in the “Migration Parade: Holon” Exhibition.
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Thank you to our funders:
MicrocosmoSoma, 2015
Penticton Art Gallery, 2015
Lake Country Art Gallery, 2017
This installation grew out of my experimenting with phenomenology and the artistic process. The first works were products of meditations, carried out in quite a structured way. I wanted to give myself a container to note what certain artistic functions felt like on the level of the physical senses. For instance, what do certain colours feel like when they touch the eye, and what is my experience of aesthetic or conceptual decisions on a body level? I am interested in the feelings and sensations that characterize the decision making process in art-making: What is the sensation of an aesthetic decision, or of balance in composition? What is the bodily experience of art-making? I made copious notes on some days during the making of these pieces, and on some days none at all. The structure was to record the date, and then the time I began and ended work on the piece for that sitting. I also recorded any thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and other phenomena that arose.
This process was influenced by my interests in the body-centred and psychoemotional therapies and different mindfulness and meditation approaches (emotional awareness approaches, Yoga, Feldenkrais method, Hakomi, Intermodal Expressive Arts, relational psychotherapies, Vipassana, Advaita/non-duality teachings, Buddhist approaches). All of these in many ways explore the nature of body/mind dualism.
The works weren't intended to be representational, yet I took delight in seeing them form into objects that resemble microscopic images of pollen, or cellular structures. The first experiments in phenomenology grounded the project and eventually gave way to working on the pieces as a collective, in a symbiosis of gallery space and artwork. Artwork continually evolves in its' encounter with us (the viewers, experiencers, perceivers, and meaning-makers) – us who so gracefully animate it by the simple act of gifting it our attention. For me, in this dynamic encounter between the artwork and those who experience it, relational space is lived and illuminated.
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