The Caged Bird Screams: Noise Awareness Day 2024

The Caged Bird Screams - Noise Awareness Day 2024

Wednesday April 24, 2024

Mason Exhibitions organized a captivating spectacle of collaborative performances exploring the ways sound art, visual art, and performance art can transcend space, borders, and carcerality, and explore themes of isolation, destruction, and transformation.

This event is an extension of the Faces of Resilience exhibitions in Buchanan Atrium Gallery during Fall 2023 and Mason Exhibitions Arlington during Spring 2024.

Artist Maria Gaspar shared 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 by Mason students and faculty into an experimental experience through touch, sound, and vibrations.

Dr. Thomas Stanley’s Sound Art students developed artworks incorporating sounds from ‘We Lit the Fire’, which were mixed into an original performance by Professor Stanley and Mason alumni musician Jamal Moore.

Did you know that the state of VA has 131 active carceral facilities? Maria Gaspar’s Disappearance Jail project records the eventual erasure of carceral geographies in each of the 50 states within the US.

Prints depicting current prisons, jails, and immigrant detention facilities are obscured through perforations using a hole puncher. Images are sourced online, while others can only be sourced through specialized databases or satellite imagery.

The penetrations enact the abolition of carceral sites. Through the gesture of perforation, the sites are rendered fragile – susceptible to disintegration by the slightest touch. Participatory community events or “Punch Parties” have occurred or are planned for Illinois, California, Ohio, Virginia, and Washington. Each state is perforated within the state and by local community members.

Professor Brian Davis and his Advanced Sculpture students presented a collaborative kinetic sculpture after a lesson with artist Stephanie Mercedes.

Special thanks to Brittany Hunter, Houry Kandoyan, Peter Pattengill and Jon Sotelo, who performed a section from Stephanie Mercedes’ destruction opera piece entitled “Never In Our Image”.