At the opening event at Atlantic Works Gallery, Middle Eastern artists and scholars Wafaa Alonazi, Amal Allkalifa and Amana Alabri performed “Everything You Might Have Wanted to Know About the Abaya but Didn’t Know Who to Ask.”

Atlantic Works Gallery, Easy Boston

View 3D gallery tour here.

The installation re-mythologizes noisy historical and contemporary events, bringing together the cannonballs and tablets I had cast at a BAU residency in Otranto, Italy, two years earlier. New works include sculptural triptychs and monoprints made in the printshop during a 2017 Mass MoCA residency, which represent deliberate subtraction of sound and actions of self-censorship.  Invited guest artists included Christine Coënon, French sound artist and filmmaker living in Paris; and Boston-based artist John Wilkinson, who fabricated a plexiglass mobile, “The Blue Bolt.”

Gallery-goers take pictures in a delineated photo booth area. People choose a word that answers: “What silences you?” They then select either a gold or black hood to pull over their head. The intention was to feel the silencing; perhaps a lack of individuality as well.

The installation impact slides between sound made visible and the unquiet silent aftershock of decapitated explosives. The exhibited Cannonball Skins are casts of the weapons fired from galley ships during the 1480 Ottoman Invasion of Italy.

The Cannonball Skins capture the essence of those weapons: the layer of silence that resides between violence and its aftermath, between life and death, between perpetrator and victim, between cultures and borders, between our earth and the dome of heaven, between stone and air.

Spent bullet casings scatter around the Cannonball Skins, bringing home the horror of invasion, war, and mass shootings, with a deliberate subtraction of sound.

Boston East Gallery

Each Cannonball Skin is marked with a word relating to the initial act of violence. Time. Space. History. Movement. Existential Questions. Fear of Sons. Conflict.

A few friends suggested black hooded heads were politically incorrect. I listened and began to witness my own silencing. Political Correctness does has silencing effect. Nonetheless, I continued. As a human being in 2017, this is what is going on, this is what I saw, this is what I associated during the artistic process.

A hood over a human head identifies that person as a silenced, single member of an oppressed group.

At the opening event at Atlantic Works Gallery, Middle Eastern artists and scholars Wafaa Alonazi, Amal Allkalifa and Amana Alabri performed “Everything You Might Have Wanted to Know About the Abaya but Didn’t Know Who to Ask.”

The three women circulated after the performance and answered questions about the silencing--or not--effect of their abaya.

During the 13-month occupation of Otranto, Italy, the Ottomans raped, killed and kidnapped Italian women, taking many to harems in Turkey.

I interpreted those abductions within a lineage of war crimes, on-the-job-harassment, domestic violence, and purposeful silencing of women by their families, men and other women. Ironically, the installation went up the same month Harvey Weinstein was arrested.

Interior view, detail

Inside the box, the War Chronicle Tablets nestle next to objects from the Mediterranean Sea.

Interior view

Like the Cannonball Skins, the narrative tablets inside the Female Abduction Box were created on the surface of Ottoman cannonballs.

Interior view, underside of lid.

There are modes-of-being that cause us to remain or appreciate the silent, whether we have been made speechless by regime, consumerism, prestige, or awe. 

Mobile made by John Wilkinson.

Lightning is one of the noisiest natural phenomena on earth, yet here we have done the impossible: made it silent.