Skip to main content

My Nightmares

I had quite a few different ideas for this project but I am happy I settled on this one. For me, this piece speaks to the everyday fears my mental illness and trauma cause me. I don’t think people fully realize how much trauma impacts your everyday life. It’s not just for writing great college entrance essays. 

Trauma has followed me since I was 14 years old. It has changed how I eat, how I sleep and how I walk around this world. It forces me awake when I don’t want to be and it forces me to sleep through important moments. It’s the ultimate double edged sword.

I am working on uploading the video of this piece in its entirety, but as it is 6 and a half hours long, it is taking a long time to fully upload and I am not sure if Cornell Wifi will even permit it.

In making my nightmare soundscape, I gathered a list of triggering and unpleasant noises and sounds, and layered them over top each other. I did my darnedest to not hear the whole thing through and to this day, either because of trauma or exhaustion, I cannot remember the order of the noises. I was able to make this impactful, while still creating it personally to mess with my head.

This piece was something of an experiment to me. I don’t know how I expected to react but I thought there were going to be a lot more panic attacks and a lot less sleep then I got. In the piece, I was able to sleep and seemed to wake up only during certain specific sounds, like my little sister screaming, or the sounds of a mother finding her child dead. Beyond that I was decently restful. I think this speaks to an even more powerful representation of my pain. This nightmare soundscape didn’t stop me from sleeping because it’s what I sleep with in my head every night. 

The critiques I received were pretty predictable, this isn’t the ideal situation to display this piece. I would have loved to have someone else create the soundscape for me and I’d love to do this in a gallery for a week long presentation. Regardless of it being not ideal, this piece expressed a concept that was still very important to me to express and I’m desperately glad I got the chance to. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Make Up for Ourselves

I really enjoyed working on project three and had a lot of fun collaborating with the women in my group, but I don’t know how much I enjoyed the art we created. It was fun and felt engaging but not necessarily powerful.  I loved doing make up and using each other as mirrors. It felt engaging because I had a very simple goal of putting on make up as best I could while helping the person across from me do make up as well. There’s something to be said for art which involves simple but active engagement with a partner on stage. I also adored making the sound score with poems and songs woven together. We got some mixed feedback on that part so maybe we needed more direct focus on the sound?  I believe we had too many ideas that we tried to squish together unsuccessfully though. We knew going into this piece that it wasn’t very audience centered and I didn’t mind that aspect, until we had an audience and they weren’t super involved. I almost wish we could have invited o...
2 comments
Read more

Our Carcinogens

As my first performance comes to an end, I am intrigued by how much I enjoy my work. I usually don't fully love the art I create. The self-doubt is always really prominent within my critique of my own work. However, I believe this piece to be a simple representation of a complex idea in a manner which causes the audience to think. That's all I can ask. During my critique period, Steven had suggested that my list of carcinogens get longer and scarier. This was an interesting idea that could have changed the meaning of my piece. But I decided to stay with my simple list for 2 reasons; 1) It is very easy to make even the safest sounding materials sound scary. For example, dihydrogen monoxide sounds scary to anyone unfamiliar with chemistry. But it is simply water. I felt that if I began listing off complex chemical names, that the story I was telling would change drastically. It would become a commentary on how easily the public can be fooled, rather than how awful the ...
1 comment
Read more

Reperformance of Wall/Floor Positions

I was thrilled to re-perform Wall/Floor Positions by Bruce Nauman. After seeing him perform his Walking in an Exaggerated Manner piece in class, I was deeply inspired by his use of body as sculpture and art. I knew I wanted to present a work of his so when I found Wall/Floor Positions, it seemed pretty perfect. I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to perform the full 60 minute piece but I of course understand, and may still endeavor to do so in the future. The 7 minute section I chose to perform was a section that engaged me deeply. I don’t know if it was the movement that was repetitive but still fresh as it was performed on different sides of the body, or if the movement itself spoke to me in terms of line and form but it was a thrill to recreate. It also had a clear beginning and I could create a decent ending to it. In order to recreate this piece, I engaged with it repetitively and tried to walk myself through the pieces of movement. I was able to find clothes that m...
Post a Comment
Read more