Music meets Animated Drawing in this exploratory hour with visual artist Katherine Desjardins and pianist Judith Gordon. Can hearing be expanded through responding with other senses? There has been much said regarding the relationship between music and visual art through the centuries. In this time of quarantine and lockdown the nature of how our senses inform each other is brought to the fore. All of us are newly dependent on technology for work and daily communication. In the spirit of non-quotidian experimentation, we aim to connect in a playful manner in order to combine music and the visual in a live-virtual collaboration. Featuring works for piano by Rameau, Chopin, and others.
A long-time active member of Boston’s art scene, Desjardins gained critical attention for works that question social and political mores through re-purposing the vernacular language of 50’s-era encyclopedias, coloring books and behavior-modification manuals. Functioning as palimpsests, these drawing-based works defy a superficial read and subvert the content of the original source material through layered juxtaposition.
Her more recent project-based work expands upon these interests through the creation of site-inspired speculative situati
ons which—to varying degrees– engage painting, drawing, video, and collaborative performance—in layered, provisional response to tensions between internal, psychological/imaginative space and external, physical/political reality.
Desjardins earned her MFA in painting in Florence, Italy, where she worked closely with mentors who came out of the Italian Radical Design movement, with whom she now collaborates. This parallel “social” practice engages with experiential pedagogy toward the collective creation of objects of speculative design. Ideally, these projects function as catalysts for awareness and discussion of a shared topic of concern—from gang violence and immigration, to the current global environmental emergency.
She teaches at the University of Chicago.