Tessa Larson

    I won't pretend to know fully what I was doing in creating this – it was more of an experiment than anything. The main theme – our environmental soundscape – it so chaotic that I figured it was okay to leave it a bit chaotic and strange. I used recordings of playing and cleaning and putting away my clarinet (as a clarinet major, that is a big part of my soundscape), the fan in my room, and the sound of stirring my daily cup of tea. I think that's it, which is wild considering how strange they sound once I finished. Even the sounds that are distinctly recognizable (even after I added an effect) become ambiguous and foreign with no context or visual, which I found fascinating. I decided to use them in a more overlapping manner: reflecting on how "the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships" (McLuhan 111). It suggests that sounds are not fully bound by temporality or place, as they can live on in memory (especially the more common, mundane sounds as well

     Gina Adams was incredible to listen to; she was so friendly and patient, answering all the questions my Senior Seminar class had when we visited her before her talk. It's incredible how much she knows about each piece from memory: not only the intricacies of the treaties printed on them (which are difficult to read in so many ways), but also of the quilts (where she found them and the little history she could figure out about them) and the specific assistants who helped her make them. She would describe the various places where she found these old, lost, and forgotten quilts, disrupting their lost-and-forgotten-ness as they became canvases, to be viewed by many, for the treaties that have been given their own supposed lost-and-forgotten-ness by a society that continues to marginalize, silence, and oppress indigenous communities. This disruptive quality is what particularly struck me: a breaking of cycles.    (photos from Gina Adams's website )      McLuhan describes the i

      As someone who has never really tried photography in a serious manner, I chose to be a bit experimental in my photos. When discussing the typical obliviousness of the general public to "see environments as they really are," I thought about how we are in a unique place currently. Being isolated and quarantining for about a year – curled up inside, watching countless global turmoils through screens – and then thrown back into everyday life has cause the general public to become more aware and somewhat disenchanted. The everyday life we've started up again is slightly different, though, and to many seems sightly surreal and distorted.      In my photo project , I reflected on how I experience this awareness of the absurdity of current daily life. As someone who is neurodivergent (a recent realization that has led me to deeply analyze how I interact with my environment), social environments have always seemed foreign, confusing, and anxiety-inducing. This strangeness ha