Open Book: Audra Wolowiec

SOUND DRAWING

This Risograph printed zine features work created during a sound drawing workshop led by Weird Babes (Caroline Partamian) and Gravel Projects (Audra Wolowiec) during the 2021 Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair where 30 participants joined internationally—together, at a distance—to create drawings in response to the prompts printed on the postcard insert: Tuning, Musical, Blurring. Featuring sound drawings by Lizzie Ridout, Fernanda Escalera, Blanca Bercial, Amalia Petreman, Brittany Smith, C. Lavender, Emma Camell, Emma Welty, Erica Lee, Gilda Lyons and Seamus Hagen,  Jeremy P. Bushnell, Jess Rees, Luzie Kuhnke, Michael Adams, Rosaire Appel, Sal Randolph, Sarah Wysocki, s.o. O’Brien, Ethan Primason, Tess Jenkins.

AIR

This limited edition with vinyl record is part of a multidisciplinary project by Audra Wolowiec, featuring a notational sound score for the breath, with interpretations of the score by Cat Lauigan, Sadie Siegel, Caroline Partamian, and Alex Waterman. In music notation, a breath mark or luftpause (air-break) is a symbol for the performer to take a breath, similar to the comma in many written languages. The commas featured in this sound score were excavated from the Constitution of the United States of America, as an embodied interpretation of a politicized text. This score can be performed as an individual or collective sounding, a chorus of breath.

Audra Wolowiec is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores sound and the material qualities of language. Her installations have been shown at MASS MoCA, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Print Center New York, and Art in General. Interviews and reviews have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Artforum, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, and Sound American. She received a 2023 NYFA grant in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts, a 2023 Artist Fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, and is currently an Artist in Residence at Center for Book Arts. Wolowiec teaches at Parsons School of Design and directs the publishing platform Gravel Projects.