Growth to beginning of gill formation., 2024-2025, video on YouTube livestreams, TikTok AI audio filter “Gigi,” directional speakers, scrap metal cut-offs, altered music stands, compasses, sheet music clip, tracing paper, hydraulic bottle jack, pneumatic air cylinder, plumbing adapters, air valve, urethane rubber, fire pit lid, thumbtacks, pistachio shells, carved pencils, plaster, found waste pipes, cigarette and newspaper ash.
Institute for Contemporary Art, Richmond, VA
Video chapters, beginning at any point:
Spinning (Salamanders Folded at the Neck)
Romance (Dung Beetles, Part 1)
Octave (2:1) for BlueGreen and Red Hot
BlueGreen
Second Octave (4:3) for Red Hot
Red Hot Riding Hood
Fifth (3:2) for Flight
Flight (Dung Beetles, Part 2)
Fourth (4:3) for Flight and Cherry Pit (Intro)
Cherry Pit (Riddle Song)
Ears and Yolks
Prime (1:1) for Cherry Pit (Riddle Song) and Ocean Floor
Ocean Floor
The installation ‘Growth to beginning of gill formation.’ imagines a sculptural drawing as an open, dynamic system. A viewer may feel the ultrasonic sound wave of a floor speaker reflecting off the ceiling; notice the change of daylight over a drawn arc of cigarette and newspaper ash on the wall; or wonder whether they can perceive the statues of found and built objects slowly releasing air pressure, maybe static, or maybe sinking down towards the video tablets.
In the video, the TikTok audio AI filter named ‘Gigi’ ages Annie’s voice by about 50 years. Intrarelated chapters with no prescribed starting point form layered imagery. Uncanny montages of visual rhymes and motifs relate to ways of making, interpreting, and translating. In voice narration and autogenerated (mis)captions, Gigi defends the romance of dung beetles and the sun from paper hats. Confuses the swimming and singing of stingrays and violins. The edit senses an underlying system based in music theory, riding this malleable but material ground of sound relationships while resisting rigid constructions—letting go of certain logic—instead insisting on the urgency and faith of an unresolved story.
The accompanying writing traces Western music theory’s dissonant wolf interval through non/chronological time. Sound waves are used to demonstrate an abiding material underlying a constructed language and system that determines dominant voices. The installation is addressed in four categories: translations of Hz sound waves to silent video interludes; the language development stage of babble, and image literacy; attention, string tension, and mediated patterns of the unheard, unseen, or unknown; and air pressure.
Unreliable narrators have to consider, more than most, who gets the privilege of being believed. Brief asides from Gigi, the same narrator as the video, interject. She touches on enforced secrets, legendary blacksmiths as a tool to question the fictive and non-fictive binary, extinction and cyclical time, and the sometimes unrequited love of maintenance.