Caption: Work-in-progress, Le’Andra LeSeur. 2022
ADVANCED PRACTICE: SONIC REMNANTS
PGFA 5301, CRN: 9636, CREDIT: 3
Monday 7:00-9:40pm
Taught by: Le’Andra LeSeur
Course Description
How does sound shape vision?
How do deep listening experiences shape us?
This course will explore how sound interacts with and accompanies visual forms to create sonic remnants. Its goal is to help students gain a deep understanding of the way that sound has historically aided how we think and process meaning and thus how experimentation with abstraction of sound has challenged the way we perceive visual forms. This course pushes beyond the general understanding of what sound acts as and instead activates a new language around what sound is – one that defines sound as rhythm, oration, gesture, and even silence. The class will introduce different forms of sonic activations through the initial study of various musical genres and visual artists who have worked directly and indirectly with sound as a form of expression. Students will dissect different rhythms and gain appreciation for the ways sound can be present with us and around us, allowing for experimentation with their own creation of a sonic piece.
The course will be split into three sections:
Section 1: Concerning Music/Sound and examining artists such as Alice Coltrane, Archie Shepp, John Cage, Joseph Jarman and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Keith Jarrett, Pharoah Sanders, and Sun Ra with class sessions examining specific live and recorded performances as well as text based publications on these artists and their work.
Section 2: Concerning Language and Oration with artists such as Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Jjjjjerome Ellis, Kendrick Lamar, NoName, Saleem Hue Penny, Sean D. Henry Smith, and Solange.
Section 3: Concerning Visual Art with artists such as Kevin Beasley, Nikita Gale, Arthur Jafa, Jamal Cyrus, Terry Adkins, and specifically examining Wu Tsang. We hold where study (2017) is collaboration with Fred Moten.
Faculty Bio
Le’Andra LeSeur is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses a range of media
including video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. LeSeur’s body of work, a celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity, seeks to dismantle systems of power and achieve transcendence and liberation through perseverance. Through the insertion of her body and voice into her work, she provides her audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as identity, family, Black grief and joy, the experience of invisibility, and what it means to take up space as a queer Black woman—a rejection of the stereotypes which attempt to push these identities to the margins. LeSeur has received several notable awards including the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019) and the Juried Grand Prize at Artprize 10 (2018). LeSeur appeared in conversation with Marilyn Minter at the Brooklyn Museum, presented by the Tory Burch Foundation and has lectured at RISD and SCAD Atlanta, among others. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at The Shed, New York, NY; Marlborough, New York, NY; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Assembly Room, New York, NY; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Arnika Dawkins, Atlanta, GA; and others.
