RAW Sensation

Reed Arts Week wants you to use your senses—all of them.

A field of wheat swaying in the breeze. Fish swimming through a coral reef. Clouds scudding across the horizon. These scenes of idyllic beauty, paired with pleasant atmospheric music, are suddenly interrupted by jagged sequences of aggressive beet-chopping, pencil-tapping, nail-biting, and knee-jerking, over a jarring soundtrack of industrial music, alarm clocks, and a baby’s cries.

This installation, titled “Moody,” is currently on exhibit in the Gray Campus Center as part of Reed Arts Week. The artist, Will Carter ’20, describes it as “a video installation that couples audio and video to manipulate sensations throughout the body.” In an attempt to make the viewer conscious and inquisitive of their own somatic responses, these incongruous scenes and their matching acoustics alternate for the piece’s full 26-minute run time.

The artist states that the work “might be insightful in helping you understand what sorts of sounds and images trigger certain responses in your body—might inspire you to workshop ways to train your somatic system into a different physiological response.” Or, he concedes, it “might just make you moody.”

Reed Arts Week (RAW) is a celebration of Reed’s art community, organized by students in conjunction with the Douglas F. Cooley Gallery and the Office of Student Services. The student czars, Juliana Cable ’19, Aersen Lease ’19, Maya Nájera ’19, and Lex Ladge ’19, curated the show, which includes work from students and artists from around the world. This year, visiting artists include Maki Ueda, Eda Yorulmazolga, Parker Day, and DJ Meisner, and Jade Novarino ’16. They also selected this year’s theme, Sensations, encouraging artists and patrons alike to “challenge [the] axiomatic primacy of sight in exchange for an interest in collective, spiritual, and somatic resonance.”

RAW opened on Thursday and will continue until Sunday, November 18. Check out the full schedule with descriptions, and get out there to experience them before the weekend is over! Free and open to the public.

Tags: Campus Life, Institutional, Students