Kristina Loring: Vanity Air
(multi-channel sound installation, variable duration)
August 2018, Appointed Time Oslo
ABOUT:
Vanity Air proposes itself as a series of sound pieces that can live in an art gallery as much as in the spaces of podcasts and radio. It is a mixtape of sorts, a response to the overemphasis of storytelling and hard narrative that the broader radio-audio medium tends to demand. Drawing on her parallel practice as an audio producer of reportage and podcasts, Loring mines the raw tape, the golden moments that accumulate but that often can’t find a home in these more standard forms, to create a more exploratory work.
Vanity Air collages sound and speech through a particularly developed method that combines interview and documentary practices with ideas of eavesdropping, surveillance, captured sound, and the archive. With Loring’s work already concerned with deepening conversations on race, sexuality, and representation, Vanity Air gives new space for these ideas to circulate in speculative and stimulating ways. The piece is furthermore highly attentive to music, allowing stretched out spans of sound (both produced and found) to interrupt the diverse voices and perspectives that inhabit the piece.
Experimental and open, Vanity Air intends to be episodic, with Loring in collaboration with other partners producing these sound collages as a series that together will inform each other toward a larger project. For the multi-channel installation in Oslo, Loring created an environment in which Vanity Air played in the Appointed Time project space while, in our second gallery room, a piece played consisting wholly of urban soundscape fragments drawn from an earlier work she produced in conjunction with her residency at White Rabbit in Nova Scotia, Canada (2016). Both tracks collided into each other in a curated mix that heighten the wandering, startling, non-linear quality of the work.
About the aritst:
Kristina Loring is an artist and audio producer based in San Francisco, California (USA). She has produced original content for outlets such as KCRW, McSweeney's, KQED and KALW. Her sound installations include works like The City and Taken with Water (White Rabbit, Nova Scotia, 2016) and Ghost Arroyos (Market Street Prototyping Festival, San Francisco, 2015). Her latest project, the podcast Cooking By Ear, has featured interviews with Frances McDormand, Tommy Pico, Mira Nair, Alexander Payne, and Big Freedia and has been featured in Vogue, San Francisco Chronicle, SF Weekly, and the East Bay Express. Learn more at kristinaloring.com