Dylan McLaughlin Performing at Art House, Santa Fe

To celebrate the end of the thematic exhibition Digital Artifacts, the Thoma Foundation is proud to host an evening of sound art performance by Dylan McLaughlin. This closing reception will take place on Friday, October 25 from 5-7pm, and the two 15-minute sound art performances will occur at 5:30pm and 6:30pm.

“Dismantle a World” is a sound performance by Dylan McLaughlin which embodies the historic and ongoing tension between technology, industry, the land, and its people. In particular, the tension between the exploitative weapons manufacturer Fairchild Semiconductor and the local Navajo Nation become the backdrop from which Dylan pulls technological and visual references. To tell this story, the artist dons a self-designed wearable textile instrument which covers his entire upper body. The instrument’s “face” is a modified circuitboard, its copper wiring responding to touch and movement by creating sound. With video footage of New Mexico landscapes as background, the performance both absorbs and projects the presence of place, combining harmony and noise, beauty and violence, human and technology.

Dylan is a multimedia artist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who works to deconstruct and make transparent the tensions in our relationship to technology. In his multimedia installations and performances, he looks to engage the poetics and politics of landscape formation and human affect. Dylan is born of the Diné (Navajo) people. He received his BFA in New Media Art from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is pursuing an MFA in Art & Ecology at the University of New Mexico. For more information about Dylan’s work, visit his website: www.coverground.org.