AUDREY CHEN / MARGARET RORISON voice and 16mm film

[auslands-filme] presents:

Audrey Chen - voice/cello
www.audreychen.com

Margaret Rorison - 16mm film projection/sound
www.margaretrorison.com

After five days of working together within a small residency at ausland, Audrey Chen and Margaret Rorison will present a mutual collaborative film/sound-performance tonight.

The collaboration between Audrey Chen and Margaret Rorison works inside the intimate worlds of their maternal lines, as experienced through the myriad sounds of the human voice and 16mm film projection.  In this project, Margaret will be experimenting with 16mm footage of her grandmother, mother and sister. She will be responding to the space of Ausland, utilizing sound and projection, while Chen will be incorporating her voice and electronics. Images and sounds captured in spaces brought together by their individual experiences of mother, daughter, granddaughter and how that affects their identities- and channels towards decision making, touch, habit, memory and language. ​

Audrey Chen is a Chinese-American musician who was born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, outside of Chicago in 1976. Parting ways with the family convention, she turned to the cello at age 8 and voice at 11. After years of classical and conservatory training in both instruments, with a resulting specialization in early and new music, she parted ways again in 2003 to begin new negotiations with sound in order to discover a more individually honest aesthetic.
Since then, using the cello, voice and occasional analog electronics, Chen’s work delves deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is extremely personal and visceral. Her playing explores the combination and layering of the homemade analog synthesizer, preparations and traditional and extended techniques in both the voice and cello. She works to join these elements into a singular ecstatic personal language.
Over the past decade plus, her predominant focus has been her solo work with the cello, voice and electronics, but she has more recently begun to shift back towards the exploration of the voice as a primary instrument.
Recent projects, aside from performing solo, include her long running voices duo with London based artist, Phil Minton, and duos with NYC abstract turntablist, Maria Chavez, French guitarist, Jean-Yves Evrard, BEAM SPLITTER, with Norwegian trombonist, Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø, the “romantic noise duo” AFTERBURNER with Doron Sadja (electronics/light projections), with modular synth player, Richard Scott, with American percussionist, Flandrew Fleisenberg and a collaborative projectwith German conceptual artist, John Bock.

Margaret Rorison is a filmmaker and curator from Baltimore, MD. Her work often develops from explorations through rural and urban landscapes, combining language, sound and imagery to create installations, films and live 16mm projections. Her recent films explore the visceral nature of memory and its dialogue between space and experience. She is interested in the potentials of storytelling through the use of 16mm projection and sound, often collaborating and performing with sound artists to explore ways in which the image and machine can converse.
Her work has been exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Miami PULSE Art Fair, Mono No Aware VI & VII, Microscope Gallery, and The Moscow Museum of Modern Art. In 2012, Rorison co-founded the experimental film and workshop series, Sight Unseen, and has been an active curator of the series since.