Sara Bouchard: The News: Monday-Friday, Parts 1 & 2
Installation on view
March 2nd- March 3rd
Performance
March 2nd, 8PM
Brooklyn-based artist, composer and musician Sara Bouchard returns to Open Source for a special combined performance and exhibition of her recently completed song cycle and series of works on paper “The News: Monday-Friday.”
The two parts of “The News” each consist of five songs that Sara wrote in five consecutive days. Each day, from Monday through Friday, Sara collaged lyrics from words and phrases cut out of that day’s newspaper and used her background in American roots music to interpret the corresponding melody and instrumental accompaniment. Sara carried out this rigorous exercise during a week in 2010 to create Part 1 and again in 2011 for Part 2.
Through this process, a modern American folk tale emerged. A community, uprooted from their homeland by a natural disaster, is forced to migrate into the unknown and adapt to their new surroundings. A kaleidescope of characters parade by: a mysterious religious leader, a haughty politician, a mourning mother, a stranger with bright ideas… It remains up to the listener/viewer to weave the pieces together, but an underlying concern emerges: how can we maintain a permanent home when the waters keep rising?
Sara will perform the songs on guitar, mandolin and autoharp amidst an exhibition of mixed media works on paper. The visual works are transcriptions of the songs in which collages of the lyrics are presented alongside Sara’s alternative system of musical notation, which she devised to emphasize visual patterns in the melodic line.
In addition to the debut of Part 1 of “The News” in 2010, Sara has exhibited and performed several times at Open Source, including her recent work “Songs of Lewis & Clark,” the group show “Associated” and the two-person show “Urban Plant Research.” “The News: Monday-Friday” was largely realized at the residency program chashama North in 2010 and 2011. Sara earned a B.A. in studio art from Yale University in 2003 and performs regularly in the Americana string band Union Street Preservation Society.
