CHRIS REEVES

Soft Noise(2022) and Green Noise(2023) are two exhibitions in an ongoing series that consider the production of noise in an expanded and poetic sense. To be noisy is to be aberrant by the standards and rules the social imposes on us (and in conventional definitions, is always the constructed aberrance of sound). Noise, by this virtue, is radical, and these exhibitions are attempts at fostering noisemaking as representative of possibilities towards producing and discovering new knowledges.

In Soft Noise 10 artists considered noise as both a literal and metaphorical object, and crafted an exhibition built upon the handling of noise, through physical objects, conceptual instructions, archival materials, and, of course, sound. Soft Noise was not an attempt at softening the roughness of noise (although considerations around emasculating the aesthetic domain of noise and its makers were explored) but rather was a giant question around just what it is about noise that keeps it "noisy," and how this occurs in the social.

Featuring: Academy Records, Betsy Odom, Cathy Hsiao, Eileen Mueller, Madeleine Aguilar, Paige Alice Naylor, Peach Miller, Ro Lundberg, Willa Smart. Co-curated with Aaron Walker at The Plan, Chicago, 11/11/22.

For Green Noise 7 artists chose their favorite noises and these descriptions were given to 14 object makers who translated those descriptions into objects, photographed them, and these photographs were given to 7 artists to translate into noises. It would seem that background noise (green noise = the background noises of the universe), in its capacity to be ignored, circumvents noise's radicality. Yet, on the level of analogy, contending with the sounds of what might be overlooked is the current struggle of our moment. By foregrounding the background noise of the world, Green Noise suggested, through its relational, responsive, and transformational nature, that within the oft-overlooked there is potency waiting to be heard.

Noises chosen by: Avril Thurman, Chris Collins, Danny Floyd, Katie Meuser, Kimberly Kim, Madison Mae Parker, Veronica Ann Salinas, Yulian Leshuk

Noise objects (responses to noises chosen) by: And Crist, Aleksandra Walaszek, Angela Inez Baldus, Barbara Baron, Camille Casemier, Elana Adler, Erin Palovick, Gabriel Chalfin-Piney, Hai-Wen Lin, Jesse Malmed, Julian Van Der Moere, Maggie Wong, Ricardo Vilas Freire, Sonya Bogdanova

Live noises (responses to noise objects): Anna Johnson, Jessica Tucker, Kim Nucci, Liz Flood, Paige Alice Naylor, Veronica Ann Salinas

At G-Cadd, Granite City, Illinois, 9/23/23