Film
Timescapes for Noticing
featuring House on Fire
Music
The Melodicas in My Life
by Richard An
Mail Art
Who Owns Nature?
about the art
For humans, we often only notice that a change has occurred after it has already happened. This month, we explore our ability to perceive change through art by House on Fire and Sheila Pinkel that challenge us to stretch our skill of noticing.
Timescapes for Noticing is a sound film that connects deep listening to climate change. Featuring House on Fire’s performance of Richard An’s musical composition for a trio of “melodica bagpipes”, the film’s rich and sustained soundscape of undulating sonic artifacts calls for a type of listening that notices small changes and shifts over time. By mapping colorful lights to the rising ocean temperature and using projection to illustrate hundreds of species being added to the threatened species list, the video design visually connects this skill of noticing to the challenge of noticing climate change's gradual effects in our daily lives.
Sheila Pinkel’s visual art practice traces a long fascination with making the invisible visible in both nature and culture. From 1977 to 1983, she used Xeroradiography (often known as Mammography) to investigate the international structure of the natural and human-made world. Her mail art piece shows the inner structure of a shell, peas, and onions. Beneath the beautiful triptych, Sheila poses the question “Who owns nature?” to reveal the unseen political forces of modern capitalism’s possessive and extractive relationship to nature.
Together, the film and the mail art urge us to see, notice, to revel in the wonder of this world that needs saving.
This art was made with support from the Eastside Arts Initiative