becoming three creatures | Stephanie Loveless

Participants

Studio XX is pleased to welcome artist Stephanie Loveless between January 9th and March 2nd 2012.

As part of her creative practice, Stephanie Loveless digitally transforms sound recordings, and vocally mimics the results, in an attempt to embody a variety of “others.”

In 2009, she turned this method of vocal research from iconic 20th century songs/singers, to the voices and “songs” of non-human creatures, with the intention of playfully – yet also seriously – exploring the boundaries between human and nonhuman subjectivity.

During her residency at Studio XX, she will be exploring the “voices” of members of three different species indigenous to Montréal (such as the sparrow, the squirrel, and the maple tree), as well as documenting this research in a series of sonic and visual études. The sound studies will be based on her vocal investigations of the sounds made by members of the species themselves, while the video studies will imagine how each creature might see and experience the world.

Attentive to thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari, Donna Haraway’s work on the ethical co-habitation of humans and non-humans, and the stories of feminist science fiction writer, Ursula K. LeGuin, she wants to encourage attention to, create affectional ties with, the non-human life around us.

In making and studying recordings of maple trees, sparrows, and squirrels – in slowing them down and performing with them, in imagining how they might see and feel, and in using this research to digitally create sonic and visual spaces – she is hoping to open her perspective, however subtly, to their respective worlds.