power talk
sound installation featured in hedge: Audra Wolowiec and Rit Premnath
Present Company
Brooklyn, NY
March - April 2018
Over the past decade, Wolowiec and Premnath have crossed over seemingly parallel interdisciplinary practices transforming the nuances of sociopolitical ephemera and perception into intricate and poetic visual iconography, sculptures, and installations. The phonetics of language and the residue of culture rooted in the artists’ works embody personal and shared histories aimed at reframing the viewers’ awareness of sense and site.
In recent works, Audra Wolowiec’s sculptural sound installations and experimental language scores have focused on the gap, space, or breath in between speech as generators of meaning. Her newest work, power talk (language from the center / language from the edge), unravels the linguistic implications of deconstructing prose from a self-help manual titled, Power Talk. This multi-channel, site-responsive sound installation alters the command vocalizations promoted in the book by vocalizing the consonants and plosives from a list of “power words” and consequently decentralizing (or destabilizing) the nature of authoritative speech into an intimate and vulnerable experience.
hedge suitably mirrors the way Audra Wolowiec and Sreshta Rit Premnath collaboratively engage within the gallery by mediating succinct interventions, subtle architectural shifts, and overlapping visual refrains. As a collection of articulations, developed from the artists’ prolonged engagement with their natural and built environments, the exhibition proposes a series of social and conceptual boundaries slowly inching to and from each other.
power talk (sound installation)
10 x 10 ft walls, 6-8 minute audio loops
2018
power talk (score)
sound score with redacted text from lists of power words
digital print
2018
installation images: Ethan Browning