Spectrogram (2025)
By Sage Foster
Spectrogram is a participatory exhibit of an oral history and documentary project recording one family’s relationship to a series of paintings. The iterative and ongoing project, which includes my grandmother's paintings, the recorded interviews that came from them, and more paintings that came from those interviews, asks questions about how (making) physical artifacts can be a tool for narrative-building, memory, and interpretation, how meaning is co-constructed and multimodal, the relationship between language and material, and what it means to do oral history in intimate space.
Through paintings, projection, and an exercise in interactive transcription, the exhibit invites visitors to consider the parallels between painting and interviewing processes, the porousness of individual experience, and the aliveness of our interactions with ostensibly static entities, such as text and paintings.
