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Alison O’Daniel weaves narrative between moving image, live performance, experimental music and object-making, she is building a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary through varying levels of access to sound, color and material. Her projects engage scoring, music-making, and captioning, though not necessarily in that order. Listening and sensitivity are of the most importance. Often her projects build upon serendipitous misunderstandings, like a game of telephone played by only hard of hearing subjects. She is particularly interested in the poetic possibility within the inevitable gaps of information that surface between subject, object, and the aural world in order to create a form of exploded storytelling that emerges between bodies of work and bodies of audience members. She hopes that this process results in a musical and performative narrative arc that is less reliant on traditional script structure and more on physical choreography and emotional navigation.
Her recent work has developed with deaf and hearing musicians, skateboarders, marching bands, composers, athletes, actors and artists whom she asks to navigate, de-construct and re-imagine sound. In 2011, she completed a feature-length film called Night Sky, which has screened with live Sign Language and musical accompaniment at multiple venues. She is currently in production on The Tuba Thieves, a project that manifests as short films, moving image installation, sculptures, textiles, and performances. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Samuel Freeman Gallery (Los Angeles), Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle (Brest, FR) forthcoming at Art In General (NYC) in March 2016, and in group exhibitions at Disjecta (Portland), 5 Car Garage (Venice, CA), the Aspen Museum of Art, MOCAD and other sites both nationally and international.
Click here for an excerpt of Tuba Thieves, and also a recent review can be read here.
