Chloe Alexandra Thompson and DB Amorin
(K.o.W is a Global Initiative)
They Can Never Burn The Stars
Knowledge of Wounds, co-curated by S.J Norman and Joseph M. Pierce
DESCRIPTION
They Can Never Burn The Stars expands through the sonic spectrum, engaging sub-bass tones to high-pitched sirens whose interactions entangle the spatial experience of listening with the expanded field of embodied proprioception. Waves, in their many forms, arrive and depart as constant companions throughout the experience, with their presence evoking this non-static quality of our condition as spatial-acoustic beings. This work takes at its heart that survivance is sanctified and ensured through the ever-changing relationship of knowledge and tradition to that which is more than human.
A creative engagement between Cree sound artist Chloe Alexandra Thompson and Pacific Islander interdisciplinary artist DB Amorin (visuals), the pair have worked towards a generative abstraction of these themes, both sonically and visually. This live experience is a joint navigation of years of creative exploration.
Knowledge of Wounds unfolds as a series of readings, meetings, discussions, and performances, and is not limited to any one type of knowledge or mode of expression. It is a ceremony, a gathering space, a fire, a calling to vibrate in good relations across Indigenous time and space, an evolving vessel for the exchange and cultivation of Indigiqueer knowledge, art, action, and medicine. At the heart of our curatorial vision is the conviction that to gather as queer, trans, and two-spirit Indigenous kin, in good relations, means centering our own forms of knowledge production, our own vibrations and beings-with. Thus, we refuse the limitations imposed on our bodies by colonialism, normative taxonomies and epistemologies, and instead dwell in (and as) liminal thinkers and practitioners.
Our liminality is flesh and our flesh is liminal. Our knowledges are wounds and our wounds are knowledge. Ancestral time and Indigenous futurity—ancestral futurity—is our mode of engagement with the interstitial possibilities of gathering and envisioning together.
Because our futures are enactments of Indigenous praxis, queer, and two-spirit conjurings, our praxis is embodied but not limited to the body. Our bodies are sovereign and co-corporeal. In co-corporeality we gather and thus name our ethical commitments to each other, our fleshly joinings. Which is also to say: our gathering is an ethical, artistic, and communal commitment to Indigeneity, to becomings, and to desiring beyond, across, the limits of colonial normativity.
As such, our work is informed by our respective practices as Indigenous people in the broader fields of art, scholarship, and cultural production. Our collaboration draws on our individual experiences and research, and Knowledge of Wounds opens space for the trans-disciplinary imbrication of the histories, experiences, and desires that we each contribute as curators, and which is in constant dialogue with the artists and participants that gather with us, and communities to which we belong.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
S.J Norman, Co-Curator | S.J Norman (b. 1984) is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. His career has so far spanned 18 years and has embraced a diversity of disciplines and formal outcomes, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video, and sound. He is a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Since 2006 he has lived and worked between Australia, Germany, the UK, and the land known to many as Turtle Island.
Joseph M. Pierce, Co-Curator | Joseph M. Pierce is associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. josephmpierce.com
Chloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree, Canadian, interdisciplinary artist and sound designer. Thompson approaches sound as a mode of connection—embracing the kinesthetic agency of sound to compose abstract feats of spatialized audio recording and synthesis. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound.
DB Amorin (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) is an artist addressing audio-visual non-linearity as a container for intersectional experience, often focusing on the role error plays as a generative opportunity. His media-centered installations are the result of DIY methodologies, lo-fi translations, and persistent, inquisitive experimentation of available materials. His work has been supported with awards from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, and the Precipice Fund grant funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Calligram Foundation and administered by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). His visual art and curatorial programming have been exhibited at the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival, A Space Gallery (Toronto, Canada), Luggage Store Gallery, Soundwave ((7)) Biennial (San Francisco, CA USA), PICA, Oregon Contemporary, FalseFront (Portland, OR USA), the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu Biennial 2019, and Doris Duke Theatre (Honolulu, HI USA), among others.
ADDITIONAL NOTES
K.o.W Partners: Performance Space New York, Performance Space (Sydney, Australia), PICA, Ballroom Marfa, The Momentary, and Blakdance.