Phoebe Barnum is a practicing visual artist, living and working in San Pedro. She has been a studio artist at Angels Gate Cultural Center focusing her practice on Ceramics, oil stick drawings, jewelry and installation. Working in sound as a completely different dimension, invisible, vibrations, transmitting, emotional reactions, juxtapose to the highly charged videos of the fires themselves, hopefully portraying the violent effects of the recent fires in Los Angeles.
Social Media:
PARTICIPATION
Collaboration with Henry Krusoe
1/7/25
On 1/7/25 Los Angeles erupted in an apocalyptic series of fires that were driven by 100 mph Santa Ana winds and record dry vegetation due to two years of wet weather followed by tinder-dry conditions. Global warming played a major factor in these conflagrations.
Most of the damage was from the two largest fires, the Eaton Fire in Altadena and the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades which also spread to the coast along Pacific Coast Highway into Malibu. More than two dozen people were killed and 15,000 homes and businesses were lost. The air quality was beyond unhealthy.
Our piece 1/7/25 performs the consequences of breathing such toxic air. Watching clouds of ash approach, rain down, and then breathe it, knowing that it was composed of particulate matter from burned asphalt, computers, and refrigerators, was a terrifying experience shared by too many.
This piece seeks to communicate the physical, and emotional consequences of the fires and as they appeared on 1/7/25 and beyond.
Installation
Gallery show, May 13 – June 17:
FATED
There is spontaneity in the work, pushing boundaries and finding liberation in in new materials. Having the backbone of traditional training has enhanced all of their forms of artistic expression.
Collaboration: Phoebe Barnum & Beth Elliott & Turdmeister (BET QU)
Coronoise: deflections of disquiet
VBODOBV | dEvolution: Personnel
σειρήνες
“The Greeks imagine that, ‘there were three Sirens, part virgins, part birds,’ with wings and claws. ‘One of them sang, another played the flute, the third the lyre.’ ”
(from Isidore’s Etymologiae)
“If anyone goes near them/in ignorance, and listens to their voices/they will never travel back home.”
(from Homer’s Odýsseia)
Synopsis of Process:
(Amid the wail of sirens):
B: “The COVID-19 Dance & Dodge, with folks on the street, reminds me of the courtship displays of birds.”
E: “Between this delicious death mask bread, peeking out from between Matilija poppies and banana leaves, and the funk art costumes on our dancing skins, I truly feel memento-mori-nourished and agonistically avian.”
T: “Let me digest that.”
Materials: field recordings; voice & voise; neandertal flute; bird calls (including peacock, crow, and lyrebird); etc.
Virtual Breakout During the Outbreak June 6th Livestream
Collaboration: Phoebe Barnum & Turdmeister
💧💧 (Drip Drip)
plumbing… @ the cusp of nature and culture…
sirenic psychopomp guiding rain back to the sea…
Source material (site specific to Angels Gate Cultural Center): field recordings of all pipe and tube systems, toilets w/ accompanying sonic latrinesquery, faucets, sinks, drains, etc.
“Cacophony consists of harsh often discordant sounds. These sounds are often meaningless and jumbled together. A Discordant series of harsh, unpleasant sound helps to convey disorder”.
Barnum’s piece examines a linear juxtaposition of discordant sounds.
Then:
The works of the French composer Iannis Xenakis and American born John Cage were both innovative and avant-garde. They both profoundly influenced 20th century music.
Now:
Our current cacophony consists of the barrage of talking heads, arguing, competing to be heard over the din. The sounds are exhausting often “meaningless and jumbled together”.