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McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
Hearing Aids
McEvoy Foundation for the Arts is pleased to announce Hearing Aids, a program of short films and videos that consider a new sensory sensitivity to a world emerging from the coronavirus pandemic. On view in the McEvoy Arts Screening Room, and in conjunction with the exhibition Next to You, Hearing Aids addresses sound, movement, touch, and language in relation to feelings of community and isolation. It is guest curated by visual artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel and runs in two parts from May 28 through August 31 and September 1 through December 4, 2021.
Within her practice, O’Daniel often collaborates with hearing, Hard of Hearing, and Deaf composers, musicians, performers, and athletes in order to highlight the loss or re-creation of information as it passes through various channels. For Hearing Aids, she exposes viewers to how sound can dictate the image, complicating our notions of how we comprehend the relationship between the aural and the visual.
Hearing Aids draws attention to a spacious view of sound not always rooted in the ear. O’Daniel, who herself is hard of hearing and wears hearing aids, cites the loss of taste and smell that is symptomatic of COVID-19 infection as a point of departure for the curation of the program. She asks whether the shared experience of these sensorial losses can usher society into a greater awareness of the body’s intricacies of communication.
“Our ability to smell and taste has been noticed because it might have been lost. It has served as a daily sensory check to make sure other symptoms of COVID are not about to follow,” says O’Daniel. “When we sit back in a movie theater, will we crave someone’s cell phone to ring, or to hear the sound of the movie in the theater next door resonating through the walls? At a concert, might we want someone to spill their drink, glass shattering, everyone turning their heads at its sonic contribution?”
Hearing Aids is divided into two sessions of short video and film works in which soundtracks, voiceovers, Foley effects, pseudo-scientific tests, conversations, hidden or forgotten mics, Sign Language, forms of surveillance, voiced instructions, and structured audio cuts all function as guides for how the body of the subject or the viewer moves through the work. Spanning the 1970s to the 2010s, films by John Smith, Daria Martin, Kathrin Resetarits, Sky Hopinka, Abigail Child, Deborah Stratman, and Jenny Brady, among others, are included in the program.
The six short films in Session 1 include Jill Magid’s Trust (2004), in which the artist allows herself to be guided with her eyes closed through the streets of Liverpool, England by the police on duty, who observe her location through their monitoring of the country’s largest CCTV surveillance system. Suné Woods’ We was just talking (2017) uses constructed and found footage to explore a tactile and sensorial terrain within intimate relationships and those to the natural world while Laida Lertxundi’s Vivir para Vivir / Live to Live (2015) explores the sensations of being lost and of reaching the horizon. Sweeping views of sparsely populated mountain regions are interspersed with sensory moments like heartbeats, sound, and color patterns to probe differences between represented and embodied experiences. Together, these films construct a web of intimate connections between touch and listening, acts of following and guidance, and the seen and unseen to pose questions about accessibility and inaccessibility.
Hearing Aids: Session 1 screens daily at McEvoy Arts from May 28 through August 31, 2021. Session 2 debuts September 1 and runs through December 4, 2021. Admission is free and open to the public. O’Daniel also curates a feature-length film screening in partnership with San Francisco’s Roxie Theater, dates to be announced. Hearing Aids is the second collaboration between O’Daniel and McEvoy Arts. In 2019 McEvoy Arts presented selections from The Tuba Thieves (2013—), guest curated by Tanya Zimbardo, assistant curator of media arts at SFMOMA.