HANNAH SPECTOR
if you stare at a cowboy's face for long enough, it turns into a sunset
7-CHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATION
LIVE INSTRUMENTAL SCORE
DEEP LISTENING SESSION
https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/nmc-presents-hannah-spector-if-you-stare-at-a-cowboys-face-for-long-enough-it-turns-into-a-sunset
Hannah Spector
Bio
Hannah Spector is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, poet, and educator. They think of language as a solid object—a concrete and spatial expression that can overturn limiting perceptions of the everyday.
Spector has shown their work at Transformer Gallery (DC), The CAM Perennial (TX), Stoveworks (TN), The Katzen (DC), and Women and Their Work (ATX). Spector’s short films have won prizes at Dumbo Film Festival, Berlin Short Film Festival, and Bodega Film Festival. They have completed residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024), Stoveworks (TN), and MoHa (ATX).
They are an Assistant Professor of Time & Technology at UT Austin and a member of the artist collective MASS Gallery. They curate the communal deep listening project, MASS Ambient.
Event Description
Join composer and interdisciplinary artist Hannah Spector for an evening of deep listening. Developed by pioneering composer Pauline Oliveros, deep listening is a practice of expanding your awareness through sonic contemplation. Listeners are invited to slow down, soften their attention, and experience sound as a way of connecting more deeply to themselves and their environment.
Throughout the evening, Spector will perform a live instrumental score for their 7-channel video installation, if you stare at a cowboy's face for long enough it turns into a sunset. Performed twice, on the hour, the score combines synthesizer, field recordings, tape loops, live voice, and improvisation. Each iteration will shift slightly. Between performances, listeners can hear the installation with its original recorded soundtrack.
Filmed over 5 years in West Texas, the immersive installation explores landscape, myth, and the poetics of place. The desert is not a void, as it is so often depicted, but rather an active landscape with vibrational subtleties that reward deep listening, deep looking, and deep care.
Show Description
The desert is not a void, as it is so often depicted, but rather, it is an active landscape with vibrational subtleties that reward deep listening, deep looking, and deep care. For half a decade, Hannah Spector has been traveling to West Texas multiple times a year to listen to this landscape. if you stare at a cowboy’s face for long enough, it turns into a sunset, is a 7-channel sound and video installation that places queer bodies within a new mythos–one that turns against the hyperreal object of the American West as an imperial proving ground.
