hiccup

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 14th  / 5:00pm – 7:00pm

ACRE is pleased to announce hiccup at ACRE Projects, artist and composer Tess Oldfield’s first solo show in Chicago, curated by Inés Arango-Guingue.

The central work in hiccup, Pitch Pipe Choir, is a group of anthropomorphic machines from an ever-shifting series of works that relies on mechanical and industrial parts and processes to simulate the artist’s own femme vocal tract sounds by way of these cyborgian choir singers use air compressors as breath; electromagnetic valves perform the complex task of the larynx—the muscle group that enables voice to be modulated rhythmically; pitch pipes, motors, and encoders emulate the voice’s resonance; and blown glass spheres embody the human mouth’s role as the last resonating chamber for sound emitted in the lungs.

Oldfield’s dutifulness in reproducing her voice outside of her body originates in her expertise in lyrical singing, a skill she silenced as grief haunted her. The singing apparatuses have filled this silence, and stand today as a robotic resurrection of her lost voice.

The voices the artist’s Pitch Pipe Choir emits rely heavily on the act of transduction, the process through which a sound is sublimated into different media. In this case, sounds from Oldfield’s human voice morph into binary code and transform into the sound of the pitch pipes and other components’ cacophonic rhythmic noise. Oldfield has also submitted her body to a kind of transduction, her organic reverberation now morphed into a Frankenstein-like composition of resonant industrial parts.

In hiccup, Pitch Pipe Choir will perform one of the artist’s original scores for four singers, inspired by medieval Hocket (the French word for hiccup), a variation of polyphonic chants where harmonies are produced in the quick alternation of two or more voices, creating a spasmodic and dynamic sonic effect. 

We invite you to join us for the opening reception Tess Oldfield: hiccup on Saturday, June 14 from 5 - 7 pm or during gallery open hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, 11am – 3pm; Saturdays, 11am - 4pm; and by appointment.

During open hours, performances will take place every 30 minutes from 9 am to 5 pm.