Songs of Tempestuous Rising and Falling

MFA Thesis Exhibition / Ellsworth Gallery

Santa Fe, New Mexico

April 2021

Songs of Tempestuous Rising and Falling is a critical embodiment of the monsters that we live among that have shaped our landscapes. It is a meditation on relationships to place, to violence, to harmony, and disharmony. Through experimental music composition and performative installation, Songs of Tempestuous Rising and Falling meditates on the resonating eco-violence of place. Focusing on legacies of extractive violence on the Navajo Nation, this work gives space to hear and feel what the acoustic world is speaking. Songs of Tempestuous Rising and Falling brings into conversation the magnitude and influence of the audible world, in its fragility, vulnerability, resistance, adaptation, and transformation. In exploring existing resonance of place as well as resonance imposed, this work offers moments to reflect on the consequence of technological and extractive projects. This exhibition of work by Dylan McLaughlin provides a space of reverence and reflection. A translation of phenomena we can experience directly.

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