Frances Barrett: Meatus
Exhibition review for Frances Barrett: Meatus
ACCA, 2022.
Frances Barrett, Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, worm divination (segmented realities), 2020, immersive sound environment 32:30 mins.
Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Andrew Curtis.
Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Andrew Curtis.
Pulsating, salivating, ringing, sucking and spurting, Meatus - mee-ay-tus - drowns you in a sonic vortex of emotion and textures - reaching towards you and from behind you, through one end and out the other, circling your body and dragging you across the gallery space. Similar to a friend, a lover, a one-night body or multiple, Meatus holds you, gyrates you, and excites you. Gently caressing your ears, nose, mouth and neck, feeling down your spine and falling into the crevasse of your anatomy, the audio comes in waves creating a visual and physical entanglement with your body and their body. Their body breathes, evolving into menacing monstrous sounds, bridging into extraterrestrial realms which elicit visions of venereal horror, only to retreat and soothe you once again. There is a warm-wetness, a lingering taste in the back of your mouth that creates a compulsion to connect, care for, and be in touch with the strangers around you. Meatus signifies a collective feeling, knowledge and autonomy - A generational queerness where instead of defining moments of separation, fragmentations are united through temporality creating an expanding field of human experience.
Meatus acts like a wormhole, transporting you into a cocoon-like red(black)hole where communication evolves into the supralingual. As Frances Barrett describes, a meatus ‘is an opening or passage leading to the interior of the body, such as the ear canal, the urethra and the nasal passages.’ Neither bound to human form nor a particular sex, the meatus is a juncture between the outside and the inside where the body opens itself to the world. Beginning with the external acoustic meatus - the ear - Barrett considers the attendant and expanded possibilities of the body. Encompassing a range of sensations and functions, the multiplicity of meatus formed a methodology to explore listening practices which activated the entire body through unconscious and conscious intensities which decentred the ear.
Installation view of Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Andrew Curtis.
Aided by the Suspended Moment: Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship and drawing from her background in curating, performance and collaborative ways of making, Frances Barrett: Meatus presents new sonic compositions and live performances at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Joining a vital sound installation by Barrett, Brian Fuata and Hayley Forward are three commissioned sound compositions by Nina Buchanan, Del Lumanta and Sione Teumohhenga, and a series of incursions by Debris Facility Pty Ltd. Soaking into your porous body or adorning your flesh (or that of the buildings), the artworks in Meatus audibly oscillate between four gallery spaces, with the few stagnant worm-like incursions clutching at the walls of the gallery.
Burrowed in plain sight as multiple interventions; jewellery, sculpture, photographic wall vinyl and a random sound loop, are Debris Facility Pty Ltd’s additions to Meatus. Shapeshifting between marketing material, catalogue contributions and tattoos adorning the artist’s body, Debris Facility Pty Ltd’s culmination of contributions defined as Earnworm 2020-22, straddles a parasitic-symbiotic nature, assimilating themselves into the anatomy of the exhibition. Alongside the exhibition, they curated an experimental performance program in response to Meatus and drew on Object Oriented Ontology framework to transform and enrich the agency of the orifice. Within the foyer of the gallery, their alarm-like sound loop disrupts the other sonic works. It burrows into the listener's ears, causing an interference with our spatial and temporal senses. Debris Facility Pty Ltd’s interventions puncture Meatus’ framework, producing incisions for material and sonic leakage. Squirming and feeding like the worm, Debris Facility Pty Ltd’s sculptural incursions cling to the mouths of the gallery spaces, marking the portal to the exhibition as if their wriggling bodies were way finders guiding you into the next dimension.
Installation view of Debris Facility Pty Ltd, EarWorm 2020-22.
Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Andrew Curtis.
Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Andrew Curtis.
As your fingertips penetrate the industrial PVC strip threshold you are enthraled into an extradimensional space. Neither standing nor floating you are drowned in red luminescence. Sounds from the mouth, quivering, tongue licking and slithers of “yeessss”, “hummmsssss” and “ummmmmssss” wash over you from thirty-nine multidirectional speakers. The voice becomes abstracted, distorted and echoes wailings, murmurings and euphoric releases over a thirty-two-minute sequence which loops back in on itself in various iterations. Cables unite the speakers creating wriggling passages to direct you through the abyss. Similar to a worm, the composition worm divination (segmented realities) 2020, is structured to replicate the segmented body of a worm. Entering through the mouth and moving out through the anus the composition is based on a series of modulated vocal performances which personify the five segments of the invertebrate animal.
It is within worm divination (segmented realities), that the collaboration between Barrett, Brian Fuata and Hayley Forward expands and queers the medical definition of the meatus. Instead of encompassing the binary of in and out, body and nobody or sound and silence, the works in Meatus collapse any distinctions between these notions and imagine them in a temporal sphere of fluidity. The sound performs as a presence of the body creating physical friction and affective qualities through sonic textures, situating itself beyond the optic. The collaboration and collective ingestion of text, sound, movement and score via the process of performance, listening and improvisation by the artists denotes worm divination (segmented realities) as a relational work. It substitutes normative hierarchical functions with inclusive autonomous modes of working. This conversational flow then collapses the distinctions between body and artistic processes focusing on the body, physical or not, as a site of intimacy, knowledge and experimentation. Similar to the worm devouring material and churning it into compost, the artists salivate and swallow each other's bodies excreting a sonic instinctive force.
Frances Barrett, Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, worm divination (segmented realities), 2020, immersive sound environment 32:30 mins.
Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Andrew Curtis.
Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Andrew Curtis.
Piercing another PVC curtain, you are situated as an outsider, confronted by five standing speakers which form a circular pentagram around two-floor speakers in the center of the space. Similar to an open invitation by a distant old friend, there is a point of hesitance before entering. As you orbit the speakers the sound reverberates off the walls, your body, and those who are also reluctant to enter, the sound flows back into itself creating a vortex which draws you in deeper. The convergence of trickling water, bird songs and a low subtle synthesizer chord entices you into the circle. Becoming engulfed in the sound, it holds you, not stagnant but swaying with you as you circulate the perimeter. Harsh distortion, echoes of sadism and thrashing delays follow, building quickly and causing the sonic arrangement to delve into chaos, holding you transforms into grabbing at you, quickening your steps around the circle to escape.
The fifteen-minute sound installation Untitled, 2020 by Del Lumanta combines sequences from four of Lumanta’s existing ambient projects. Employing a contemplative sensibility, each of the audio works relies on the methodology of improvisation for their structure, with the installation programmed to play each track at random, alternating the sequence each time the work is audible. Through this methodology, Lumanta creates alternative universes and changing futures, queering temporality into a non-linear timeline, never beginning and never-ending. Overcome by layers and disorder, the work extends beyond physical listening, becoming a portal to experience time without the obvious causal connections between events.
Del Lumanta, Untitled 2020, sound installation, 15:00 mins, installation view, Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Andrew Curtis.
Bleeding into the next gallery space and tempting you onto the floor are gentle extraterrestrial pulsations of sound radiating from ten speakers. A combination of reversed ethereal wind instruments and synthesizer tones sing to you. Subdued by their elegance you stretch out across the floor, your body is enticed to reach for others, cultivating community through touch and affection. Greeted by openness and warmth the composition propels you into the clouds to float in the stratosphere. A subtle reprieve from the counterflow of time, here time is stationary, somewhere on the nexus between preadolescence and puberty. Seemingly safe at first, the tonal qualities transform moving into sequences of guitar and vocals contorted by effect pedals. Aided by periods of silence, resonant swells and jarring noises, the extraterrestrial pulsations evolve into monstrous howling, embedding the physicality of the body within the space.
Sione Teumohenga’s site-specific sound installation Untitled, 2020 resonates for just over fourteen minutes. The crux of the work is made with a natural resonant recording of the gallery space, that Teumohenga then refined into a sound sample similar to a bell. This ringing can be heard and felt throughout the piece. Rather than situating the work within queer time, Teumohenga contemplates the relationship between the sound, the listener and the architecture of where the listening takes place. Foregrounding listening as a relational and communal pursuit similar to reciprocal touch, Teumohenga brings our attention to the complexities of our surrounding environments and the imbrication of the body. The convergence of these circumstances creates unique encounters magnifying our fleshy-bodies ability for porous listening which forms intimate, collective and caring modes of being.
Nina Buchanan, Body Scanner, 2021, multi-channel sound installation 15:00–20:00 mins.
Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Andrew Curtis.
Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Andrew Curtis.
Crawling across to the next gallery you’re met with a wall of sound. In constant movement, it oscillates between gentle waves of soothing ambience then escalates into low thuds and anxiety-inducing visceral grating. Tingling through your extremities, your breathing deepens, your palms sweat and your body raises off the floor. Your spatial and temporal compasses are forced out of sync as if being abducted and relocated to another dimension. You’re being watched, scanned, prodded at, and examined. The shifting tempos and phasing of the low droning synthesizer disorientate you. Attempting to regain autonomy you shift your listening (gaze). You embody the unease of those around, part exhibitionist, part voyeurist, surveilling the surveyor, beguiled by the sonic vortex encompassing you, you can’t move. The sonic complexity reduces, the sweat subsides, and you’re spat out at the opposite end of the gallery having experienced sonic protrusions through each part of your porous fleshy body.
Nina Buchanan’s Body Scanner, 2021 oscillates between fifteen to twenty minutes sonically activating ten speakers. Exploring the multiplicity of what a body scan can be, Buchanan uses complex polyrhythms and shifting tempos to morph between sonic visions of body horror and abduction to security screening which reveals your internal cavities. Affectively attacking the body and forcing it through several distressing embodied experiences, Buchanan disorientates and problematises the audience’s agency and autonomy over their own body. At the intersection of the affect, porous bodily listening, and monitoring is the queer body - a body which has been and is subjected to control, inspection and policing. Buchanan’s sonic constellations allow for the metabolising of subconscious emotional experiences, which are felt by most but are magnified through the queer experience.
Reverberating, regurgitating, excreting, imbibing and slurping, Meatus devours sweat, tears, saliva, blood, mucus and cum. Meatus devours literature, poetry, dramaturgy, sound design, emotion and sensuality. Meatus forges a compost which foregrounds the body as a site of knowledge, intimacy and experimentation. Into this meatus the audience penetrates and, reciprocally, the sound waves penetrate their meatus. Acting as a wormhole, transporting you into a cocoon-like red(black)hole where communication evolves into the supralingual. Meatus collapses in on itself, morphing into an open chasm enveloping and affecting everything in its path. Encompassing a range of sensations and functions Meatus holds you, gyrates you, and excites you, opening a new language, a queer methodology that twists temporality connecting us with others.
ARTISTS: Frances Barrett, Nina Buchanan, Debris Facility Pty Ltd., Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, Del Lumanta and Sione Teumohenga.