To mark the closing of A Memory Held In You, curated by Allegra Hangen and Alex Jacobsen, Alex Jacobsen along with Lincoln musician, Jay Kreimer, will lead a virtual deep listening experience via Zoom based on the practice pioneered by Pauline Oliveros. Following Olivero’s instructions for a traditional deep listening practice, participants will be led through a number of exercises that aim to attune our sense of hearing with our physical bodies and surroundings. Participants will partake in one and a half hours of experiential listening accompanied with actions like journaling, a slow walk, and a group improvisation.
Please register in Eventbrite to receive a link with Zoom meeting details and more information.
About the exhibition:
A Memory Held in You, curated by Allegra Hangen and Alex Jacobsen is an immersive virtual installation that examines how what we see, hear, and feel is woven into the fabric of a remembered experience. In a series of digital events staged across social media platforms and Amplify Arts’ website each week beginning May 8th - June 19th, Allegra Hangen (@allegrahangen) and Alex Jacobsen (@xelajacobsen), in collaboration with Gayle Rocz (@sparklyfrenchfry), Isabella Starkey Meier (@isabella_sm_), and Jay Kreimer collectively bring into the question the legitimacy of cognitive hierarchies by conscripting video, sound, and prerecorded performance into an audio-visual lexicon that fragments memory’s factual accuracy.
Could a “better” memory be held in our devices, in the files we share with each other, in a collective mediated experience in isolation? Maybe a “better” memory isn’t a sharper or more exact one. Maybe a “better” memory is held in impressions left behind by echoing vibration, mediation, or fleeting gestures embodied for only a second.
This exhibition is presented with the support of the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
About the artists:
Allegra Hangen is a photographer, experimental video maker, and video installation artist residing in Omaha, NE. She received her BFA in Photography from the Art Institute of Boston (currently Lesley University College of Art and Design) in 2014, and her MA in 2019 from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. In 2018, she exhibited two solo shows in Mexico City and has been part of various international group exhibitions and film festivals in cities like Boston, Oaxaca City, Mexico City, Vancouver, Buenos Aires, Aguascalientes, among others. Her video work focuses mainly on memory, family archives, media representation and the dynamics between the political and the intimate.
Alex Jacobsen is a sound artist based in Omaha, NE, whose audio work focuses on the plasticity of sound and aims to connect us with environments and situations that exist outside of our current temporal-spatial experiences. He received his Bachelor of Music from the University of Nebraska at Kearney in 2016. He has interned at Evergroove Studios in 2016 and with artist in residence, Marc Vilanova, in 2019 at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Within the past year, he has shown his sculptural sound pieces at Red Eye and Confluence in Lincoln, NE and at Konvent in Barcelona, Spain, where he was also on residency.
Jay Kreimer is an improvising musician, instrument inventor and sound artist. He has been creating new musical instruments for nearly thirty years. He performs internationally: throughout North America, across Europe, in China and India. In 2013 he returned to India on a Fulbright fellowship to document street wedding bands, which have been referred to as the garbagemen of Indian ritual music. In March 2011 he was a finalist in the Guthman musical instrument invention competition, with his instrument Tall Boy. He has performed with Bryan Day for over ten years and the Mighty Vitamins for fifteen, with 10+ album releases between them. Spring 2019 he participated in an eight show tour of Mexico with Bryan Day and Marco Albert, in support of the recent Albert Day Kreimer album Mutations. He has performed at the two most recent incarnations of FIME, the Festival of Extreme Music, in Queretaro, Mexico. He has created sound works, sculpture, photos and video for many installations with Wendy Weiss. As a solo artist he has performed across North America and in Europe, including a performance of his water based piece, “When it’s Gone,” at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, one of many of his appearances in the Soundwave Festival. He has a long association with the Deep Listening Institute and is certified to teach Deep Listening practice. This year he was the subject of a video segment of Nebraska Stories on NET, talking about his instrument making work. This piece has been featured on the PBS national website ArtsCanvas, and the PBS Newshour facebook page. A fairly recent obsession with the urban crocodiles of Gujarat has been stymied by the non-response of the Gujarat forestry department. Extensive video work remains in limbo.
Watch the Nebraska story about Jay here.