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PAST Exhibitions & EVENTS

Interference: A multi-media
installation by Liza Sylvestre

Opening Reception:

Saturday, July 29, 5-9pm Artist Talk 5-6pm


Show Runs:

July 29 – August 26

Interference is an immersive multi-media experience created by artist Liza Sylvestre. Sylvestre explores her personal struggle with what it means to live in a hearing world. She wears a cochlear implant, which enables her to hear to a degree, but she still struggles with how much to conceal or reveal about her inability to follow conversations in certain settings. Sylvestre’s current body of work is an exploration of constantly feeling exposed and vulnerable to judgment. It encrypts information obfuscating the meaning of words both written and spoken to the viewer through drawings and video.

By creating barriers to understanding the work becomes its own specialized language in which Sylvestre can explore mechanisms of how to take back control of language. This inverts her feelings of isolation onto the audience. Some aspects of the exhibition allow for a partial understanding, producing a sense of confusion or misinterpretation such as the pages upon pages of personal handwritten text pinned to the wall with letters redacted. In Background Noise, the viewer will put on headphones while facing a video monitor confronted face to face by Sylvestre talking at a volume that is partially audible, all the while a high pitch buzzing pulsates in the background. While other pieces such as The Invisible Language eliminates any perceptible form of communication, reducing words to a series of sounds without definition. All of the work translates Liza Sylvestre’s auditory experiences and her view of language as “an object that can be divided, pulled apart and put back together in new forms.”

Liza Sylvestre is currently a University Fellow and an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Sylvestre’s work has been shown nationally in many cities including Miami, FL, Berkeley, CA and Portsmouth, NH. She recently completed a 25-piece commission for the 4 star James Hotel on Miami Beach and her artwork is part of the permanent collection of the Rochester Museum of Fine Art in New Hampshire. Sylvestre is the co-founder of Creating Language Through Arts, an educational arts residency that focuses on using art as a means of communication when there are language barriers present due to hearing loss. In 2014, she was awarded both and Artists Initiative and Arts Learning grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Recently she has been the recipient of a VSA Jerome Emerging Artists Grant, and a fellowship through Art(ists) on The Verge.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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