DADAA

This exhibition presents the work of three artists exploring mental health as a collective and cultural experience through the medium of sound. Incorporating video, sculpture, and poetry, their work breaks the socially encouraged silence around madness, trauma, and neurodivergence, amplifying the voices of people with lived experience.

About the works:

Matt Gingold, Delay Orkestra

Delay Orkestra engages with contemporary discourses around machine listening, rationality as central to techno-capitalism, and the role of diagnosis in mental health identity. The work is inspired by Alvin Lucier’s seminal I Am Sitting in a Room, in which Lucier records his own voice in a room and then repetitively plays it back and re-records it until it becomes a wall of unintelligible noise. At the end of the text Lucier explains that the works is “less of a demonstration and more a way to round out the words I am speaking”, referring to his own ‘disability’: a profound stutter.

Carefully and precisely arranged to apparently float in the air, Delay Orkestra consists of four custom designed and built sound cards, each with four microphones and four speakers. The first microphone of each unit points to the last speaker of the unit before it, forming a circular delay or feedback loop. Every time a microphone detects a sound, it starts recording and then plays back what’s it’s “heard” through the next speaker. You can even shout into one of the microphones/speakers and you’ll hear your own voice get repeated until it turns into feedback or fades to silence.

The words you hear are taken from 1400 verbatim excerpts from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) – specifically the chapter on Bipolar Affective Disorder. This alarmingly titled and controversial text is largely considered the most authoritative book for psychiatric diagnosis. The samples are spoken by classic Apple Mac voices, chosen to evoke the dispassionate connotations of diagnosis and automated phone menus and digital assistants. It is worth noting that since the 90s every Apple computer has shipped with a set of synthetic voices that include one called Hysterical and another Deranged.

Delay Orkestra is the fourth in a series of works that are tied together by aesthetic and conceptual concerns about digitality and the science as (and of) technological consumerism. In general technology is understood as the literal product/s of technical “sciences” – yet often they are nowhere near as reliable, innovative or useful as we are led to believe. Our technological desires mostly revolve around sleek surfaces and the obscuration of the “work” involved in both the manufacture and everyday use of the machine. In Western society this has always been entwined with hidden human labour and resources.

By hiding the inner workings of the machine, we obscure the complexity and materiality of technology in order to maximise profits and/or sooth our consciences by ignoring the exploitation of labour and the extraction of nature. By turning the machine inside out and arranging its functional parts in organic forms that attempt to defy physics and echo animistic qualities of undersea forms, these orchestras seek to oppose the coldness of products and profit and replace them with the intentional “working-chaos” of radical materiality. 

Jenny Hickinbotham, Songs of my Adventures: vivid sense

Songs of my Adventures: vivid sense are seven video/song creations, one song without a video and three sculptural paintings, inspired by my travels from Gisborne, Victoria to Fremantle, Western Australia 17 Dec 2022 – 15 Jan 2023.

I drove across in my Honda CRV, with my three Tenterfield Terrier dogs in the passenger seat, adding a second seat by filling the foot-well and putting a dog-bed there, plus there’s a dog-bed between the two seat backs. I towed a trailer with my tent and some fencing for containing the dogs in caravan parks.

Writing songs is a great joy for me, I get to express my quirky ideas, and share my crazy thinking, my learning, my lived experience, I love to add a shake of humour and pathos, I love to share history, general knowledge, facts and figure, also I love to create curiosity in my audience, I want to make you think and ask questions. Another strong theme in my songwriting is emotion. I’ve lived a difficult life of chronic abuse, exploitation, neglect, and violence. In order to understand my own mental health and the impact my lived experiences has on my thinking, emotions, behaviours I built a brain for my Honours project at RMIT in 2020. This led me to neuroscience and I’ve never looked back.

Neuroscience of the mind is likened to the innovation of the telescope which locked the secret of our galaxy and beyond. I have a depth of awareness now and totally understand how my mind works and what I need to practice and change to live an independent, safe, healthy and active life. Dr Dan Siegel, interpersonal neuroscientist, says ‘name your emotions to tame your emotions’. I try to do this in my writing and singing, give voice to my pain, my challenges, pushing my way beyond the silencing of my family, voice my chronic emotional abuse. Language is my tool and I dig into it, play with it, explore and challenge it with a passion.

The three songs you access via the QR code provided in the gallery are called Personal Growth Journey Songs, they are emotionally focused and perhaps a little challenging, but being aware of our triggers, addressing them, and sharing them makes us stronger.

Zora Kreuzer, Euphoria

Euphoria consists of a light installation and audio. The five windows of the gallery are covered in colour gels, filtering the daylight and creating a colour spectrum. From Green, Blue, Magenta and Orange to Yellow. Additionally, there are two audio files with field recordings from Western Australia.

The coloured light wanders around the gallery space during the day. Any moment you are in the gallery it’s showing a different situation. Mornings to midday in indirect light the colours glow, then direct light hits the windows in the late afternoon creating colour patches on the walls or the beams in the roof. The work spreads out in the gallery and every part of the space becomes a carrier of the colours. The accompanying audio pieces consist of field recordings of cockatoos, cicadas and crickets.

I created a loose analogy with the colours and the sound. Each of the colours have a different wavelength which is translated to a sound with a different frequency. On the side with the cooler colours, the green, blue and the magenta you hear a low frequency tone with high pitch crickets in contrast. And on the side with the warmer colours, the yellow and the orange you can hear a higher frequency tone with the sound of cockatoos and cicadas. The animals add another frequency.

After several visits to Perth and its surroundings I still find so much beauty in the nature here. The bright sunlight, the ever-changing colour of the ocean and sunsets. With Euphoria I want to recreate a feeling of bliss, wondering through nature, listening to the sounds of the bush. Working with light, colour and sound give me an opportunity to reconnect with my emotions and activate another part of my brain, helping dealing with anxiety, depression, and trauma.