Jupiter Nights: claire rousay // Matchess
DOORS 7PM, MUSIC 8PM
At the Basilica Gallery Building
108 South Front Street, Hudson, NY 12534 (right next to the main building on our campus)
JUPITER NIGHTS – Basilica Hudson’s new weekly series of arts events in our Gallery Building – continues with claire rousay and Matchess.
CLAIRE ROUSAY
claire rousay is based in San Antonio, Texas. Her music zeroes in on personal emotions and the minutiae of everyday life – voicemails, haptics, environmental recordings, stopwatches, whispers and conversations – exploding their significance.
MATCHESS
Whitney Johnson (Matchess) is an artist who interprets the unknown with sound. She composes, improvises, and collaborates with the viola, as well as the organ, electronics, and vocalization. Her techniques reproduce meaning through a range of historical material processes, including reel-to-reel tape looping, cassette tape sampling, and field recording.
MORE ABOUT MATCHESS
Whitney Johnson (b. 1981, Clearfield, Pennsylvania) is an artist who interprets the unknown with sound. She composes, improvises, and collaborates with the viola, as well as the organ, electronics, and vocalization. Her techniques reproduce meaning through a range of historical material processes, including reel-to-reel tape looping, cassette tape sampling, and field recording.
Three recent works have engaged with skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on the body. Huizkol (premiered at Lampo), The Tuning of the Elements (curated by the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), and Fundamental 256 Hz (commissioned by Longform Editions), each considered the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique that uses binaural beats to induce a relaxed or energized mental state.
In the Matchess Trilogy (2013-2018, Trouble in Mind Records), she used the limited palette of a 1960s Ace Tone Top-5 combo organ, an analog Rhythm Ace drum machine, viola, and voice to craft transient sound collages on beds of droning ambient noise.
In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018, writing a dissertation on the cultural value of embodied sensory perception, particularly in the discipline of sound art. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts and Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and will be a postdoctoral researcher in 2022 on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University in Sweden.