Sol Cabrini. Photo by Emile Osborne.
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For Open Studios, Ethan Philbrick gathers a group of artists and scholars working in and around sound to explore an idea of “listening-writing” alongside one another. Sol Cabrini will present a single from her new album, “Ordinary Delusions,” while engaging both the mechanical and lyrical input that went into the project; Isaac Jean-François will turn to the 1979 Sister Sledge track “Lost in Music” to examine how black art aestheticizes social and internalized experiences of loss; Meesh Fradkin will offer a sound art piece and an accompanying critical meditation on disability arts; and Isaac Silber will investigate the art of microphone placement, exploring how subtle changes in orientation bear deep affects upon the practice of listening to and inscribing sounds. Each of these artist-scholars are currently in the midst of doctoral study and this Open Studio will offer them an opportunity to share their sonic and textual research beyond academia’s institutional enclosures and genre conventions.
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Open Studios is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
Biographies
Sol Cabrini is a Black-American of Louisiana Creole descent born and raised on the Southside of Chicago. Her interest encompasses poetry, electronic music, rap, Black studies, Trans-women studies, phenomenology, and film making. She is a PhD student at NYU Performance Studies.
Isaac Jean-François is a doctoral student in the joint degree program with African-American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Jean-François’s research interests include black studies, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and sound studies.
Meesh Fradkin is a PhD student in Music (Interdisciplinary Music Technology) at McGill University. Her research works across sound studies, sociology of knowledge, disability and chronic illness, and technology and is combined with use of different software and hardware. Meesh is also a researcher at the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology, and the Disability Archives Lab. She is currently a Leonardo Criptech Incubator Fellow.
Isaac Silber is a multi-instrumentalist recording artist and sound designer whose research focuses on the intersections between black radical, feminist and queer of color thought with underground musical practice, production and performance. He is currently a fourth year PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU, working on a dissertation project entitled “Deep Underground: Entanglements of Matter and Music-Making between Philadelphia and New York City,” which explores the interconnectedness of soul and dance music in the vibrant corridor connecting Philadelphia and New York City, through a Black Quantum Futurist lens. As a musician and sound designer, Isaac has performed with artists such as Anh Vo, Orion Sun, Ivy Sole, Omar’s Hat, Edwin Torres, and others.
Ethan Philbrick (curator) is a cellist, artist, and writer. His book, Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press (April 2023). Recent projects include Slow Dances (with Anh Vo, Tess Dworman, Niall Jones, Tara Aisha Willis, nibia pastrana santiago, and Moriah Evans) at The Kitchen Video Viewing Room (2020) and Montez Press Radio (2022), DAYS (with Ned Riseley), Mutual Aid Among Animals at the Park Avenue Armory (2022), and Song in an Expanding Field at The Poetry Project (2022). He holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University and has taught at Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, Muhlenberg College, and New York University.