Experimental sound performance — Disappearing Acts: A Sonic Response

Join the Chicago Justice Gallery for a powerful sound performance featuring experimental sound artists Regina Martinez, Jared Brown, A.J. McClenon and Carissa Lee responding to Soledad Fátima Muñoz’s solo exhibition “We’re Not All Here / No Estamos Todes.”

Through live sonic interventions, the sound artists will engage with themes of political erasure, memory and resistance, amplifying the silent traumas left in the wake of state-sanctioned violence and civil neglect. As Muñoz’s work confronts the haunting reality of those lost to authoritarian regimes and forces beyond visibility, these performances give form to what resists disappearance: sound as echo, archive and act of defiance.

RSVP: go.uic.edu/DisappearingActs

Regina Martinez experiences sound as records of our connections and departures. Her current experiments draw from an archive of infinitely personal recordings she relates to as soundmarks: her father’s hands cleaning dried beans, the flap of our clothes outside on the line, the creak of the front gate to home. Each moment becomes its own instrument, its own layer of composition and a washing and wringing out of memory meant to be overheard like a poem again and again.

Often under the alias selective listening, her work evolves through vinyl DJ sets, live performance and sound design for film and movement. She’s part of the family at 606 Records and produces the radio show “alluvia’s fluid” for Chicago Public Media Institute’s Lumpen Radio.

Jared Brown is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago. In past work, Brown broadcast audio and text-based work through Central Air Radio 88.5 FM in live DJ sets and on social media. They consider themselves a data thief, understanding this role from John Akomfrah’s description of the data thief as a figure that does not belong to the past or present. As a data thief, Brown makes archeological digs for fragments of Black American subculture, history and technology and repurposes these fragments in audio, performance, text and video to investigate the relationship between history and digital, immaterial space.

They have presented work at IIT, School of Art at the University of Manitoba, Graham Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Southside Community Art Center, Poetry Foundation, SmartBar, Roman Susan, Steppenwolf Theater and the Hyde Park Art Center.

A.J. McClenon is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and educator whose practice moves through text, repurposed materials, moving and still images, performance and sound. McClenon’s work is driven by familial and collective grief, water, Blackness, geomorphology and the global future. Drawing from physics, psychology and visual and sonic languages, McClenon explores how time, ecology and the decentering of humanness overlap and examines the Earth as a living archive and sonic instrument. McClenon has shown work and performed at MCA Chicago, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center and is currently an assistant adjunct professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Carissa Lee is obsessed with the visceral across all mediums of her work (performance, sound, public intervention, workshops, video and theater). Her work is rooted in Black exhalation — the breath between grief and jubilation, isolation and communion. Her work builds a home she is still searching for, using recordings, writing and Black Southern culture, including its medical histories, stories and music, to materialize emotions and invite collective reflection.

Interested in the science of spirit, she tests hypotheses with audiences, transforming the dynamic between performer and viewer into one of shared participation and discovery. Her work explores the emotional landscape and tensions of global anti-Blackness by researching the known — personal experience, Black vernaculars and cultural memory — to illuminate the unknown. She is captivated with the mundane, finding meaning in everyday acts: washing clothes, walking, breathing, quiet listening, watching waves and uncovering the mythologies woven into Black Southern life.