Pollution.tv Studios, Los Angeles, CA  

Included as part of LAND’s 2018 project, Exchange Value

Single channel projection (18 min), wood flat, sound installation with speakers, trumpet instrumentation

Alison O’Daniel’s single channel projection combined short, ambient videos that were shot in the process of filming The Tuba Thieves, O’Daniel’s multi-year project and feature-length film. The projection was accompanied by artist Helga Fassonaki and Omar Corona, alumnus of the Centennial High School Marching Band (and an actor in the film), both on trumpet.

In 1983, Andrei Tarkovsky received a letter from a physicist trying to explain his interpretation of Tarkovsky’s film The Mirror. In the letter, the physicist says, “You have to watch this film simply; watch it as one watches the sea, or the stars, as one admires a landscape.” In these collection of scenes, O’Daniel films Nyke Prince (the film’s main character), Deaf friends and lovers, and a group of marching band students in various landscapes/soundscapes around Los Angeles looking at, watching, and seeing the sea, the stars, and the land.

Throughout The Tuba Thieves, and highlighted in this exhibition’s scenes, O’Daniel explores the qualitative aspects of the loss of sound, an extended game of telephone where the audience is often tasked with sitting comfortably in a tension between a filmed sequence and a break in its expected auditory qualities. The film spans across narrative filmmaking, experimental documentary, installation and sculpture. O’Daniel, attempting to articulate her own experiences being hard-of-hearing, engages concepts of accessibility and subverts assumed egalitarian notions of comprehension.

LAND’s Exchange Value exhibition, curated by Shamim M. Momin, considers concepts of value and exchange: the ways in which objects and experiences are assigned value, how value is denoted/connoted, and the social transaction of beliefs, cultures, and commodities. 

Landscapes. The Sea. The Stars. is curated, and produced by Irina Gusin.