September 4 – November 3, 2015

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, Jonah Groeneboer: Double Mouth Feedback underwent constant modifications; the features of this page provided accruing information on the Session’s developments and will continue to track the project’s progression beyond Recess’s walls.

Events

About Jonah Groeneboer: Double Mouth Feedback

On September 4th, Jonah Groeneboer will begin work on Double Mouth Feedback, as part of Recess’s signature program, Session. Session invites artists to use Recess’s public space as studio, exhibition venue, and grounds for experimentation.

Groeneboer’s project will create a space that defies binary gender constructions as they exist within sound. This installation will be at once a recording studio, a meeting place for discussions of relevant texts, and a performance space where visitors can make and record sound acts. Throughout the course of the project, the artist will host recording and reading sessions that encourage the abandonment of normative vocal behaviors as a means to re-imagine gender systems through sound. This project will result in a multi-channel vocal composition created with electronic composer Bruno Coviello.

Double Mouth Feedback explores the human voice as an instrument to express, or conversely, to repress, the self. The politics of passing within the trans-community, queer, and feminist dialogues have all addressed modes of gender regulation and the coding of one’s behavior, manner, and vocal pitch in line with normative binary gender constructions. These constrictions are imposed across society; all are affected by gender appropriate behavioral pressures. In this project, the human voice is also treated as an instrument of extension, toward breaking down binary gender systems, and imagining more inclusive possibilities.

Structurally, Groeneboer will incorporate the material aspects of sound, using wave patterns, interference phenomena, and vocal superposition to weave together and imagine new gender models.

A series of events will take place during the course of this Session, among them composer and vocalist Nick Hallett will lead all gender voice lessons, connecting embodied sound with identity construction in order to help participants project their voices and be more clearly heard.

About the Artist

Jonah Groeneboer is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, drawing, video, and photo. He works within the aesthetics of post-minimalism and abstraction to engage with the relational systems of form and meaning. In his work, the abstract formal gesture is used to pose new spatial models to replace outmoded binary concepts. The theoretical foundations of his practice include new materialism, non-universal phenomenology, and queer studies, as well as his own experience as a queer and transgender person. Groeneboer uses forces such as tension, gravity, light, time, and sound as material. In these works, motion, stillness, material presence and absence co-occur, and address questions of proximity, perception, position, and orientation.

His work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and internationally in London, Berlin, and Oslo. His work has been written about in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Art Journal. Jonah Groeneboer has been an artist in residence at Ox-Bow School of Art, the Fire Island Artist Residency and was a founding board member of the Shandaken Project. In Addition to Recess Session, forthcoming projects for 2015 include a solo show at Platform Centre in Winnipeg and a group show at CAMH. He has taught studio, art history, and theory classes to both undergraduate and graduate students. He is based in New York City.

This program is supported, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. This project is also supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts Art Work and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.