Julia Edith Rigby has performed at LEAF Festival in Lafayette, Colorado (2024), LOW End in Omaha, Nebraska (2023), and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida (2023). She is a recipient of artist grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. She was the Sound Art + Experimental Music Fellow at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska in fall 2023. Rigby received her MFA in Studio Art at the University of California, Davis (2020).
Artist Location: Santa Ana, CA
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PARTICIPATION
earmaginations [silent videos] On-site June 1st and online June 9th
Fever Dream II invites the viewer into a vibrant, multisensorial and emotive exploration of climate change, climate anxiety, environmental phenomena, sense of place with relation to land and water, perception.
Crop-up Installation On-site June 3rd
Soundscapes [audio tracks] On-site June 3rd and online June 11th
Foghorn Ecologies
Foghorn Ecologies queers the idea of a foghorn by inversing the relationship of who is making the sound and who is listening. Found, traumatized instruments are welded into new amalgamations and temporarily installed in the ocean.
What are different ways to listen, and what can listening do for us and our relationships with our world? How can sonic explorations transform our awareness of and relationships to a site, our sense of place?
The project experiments with the concept of an ocean-powered sound sculpture. What can speculative sculpture do for our sense of place? How can sound transform our awareness of and relationships to a site?
The sounds we are hearing in this piece are the sounds of myself and the sea playing the sound sculptures I welded from found, broken brass instruments. The sound sculptures were temporarily installed in waters a little south of San Pedro Bay.
Sea Cave Complex
Sea Cave Complex explores the idea of existing inside a sound. The project temporarily transforms a complex of local sea caves into a sound sculpture in which viewers / listeners are invited to explore sensory perception and relationships between humans and non-human systems. It’s a phenomenological experiment that asks questions like: what can speculative sculpture do for our sense of place? How can sound transform our awareness of and relationships to a site? Which elements of a particular site—in this instance a specific tidal ecosystem—are we perceiving or not perceiving? How might a sea cave transmogrify into a soniferous body? An intervention with wire and bow gives voice to the sea caves. The caves becomes resonating chambers for sounds previously un-hearable and unheard. We can hear the caves breathing. Caves are sites of inhalation, exhalation, decomposition, degeneration, regeneration, recomposition. The audio composition reflects these processes.