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The artist with his sound installation, Mass, the anchoring piece in What Was Lost and What Remains.

Marcus Fischer--What Was Lost and What Remains

Kenton

When

Nov. 3, 2023–Feb. 11, 2024

Friday through Sunday, Noon – 5 p.m.

Free

Where

Oregon Contemporary

8371 N Interstate Ave
Portland, OR 97217

The following description was submitted by the event organizer.

What Was Lost and What Remains is a collection of work addressing themes of loss,  generational trauma, and gun violence in America. Still, it is also a container to hold space for these things that aren’t so easy to discuss.

Artist Statement:

How does loss change us? What is an acceptable amount of Loss? What do we do with that now? 

These are questions I have been asking myself for years.

There are many different types of loss. Loss takes varied forms and manifests in different ways. It is one of those intangible things that is defined by the absence of something rather than by its presence. But it can be something that we feel in our bodies. Loss changes us. 

In music, I regularly explore generation loss experienced through recording sound upon sound on the same length of tape — listening to each subsequent layer —  forcing the past to be erased. You can both see and hear the degradation from repeatedly making a copy of a copy. Things start to distort and change in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Moving from the sonic artifacts of loss into the physical, I have been searching for ways to illustrate these ideas through objects. It has led me to work with new materials and methods, melting and casting brass, letterpress printing on fabric, and mapping data in spreadsheets to convert charts into graphic scores. 

The anchoring piece in What Was Lost and What Remains is a sound installation titled Mass that began as an attempt to grasp the ever-increasing multitudes of individuals lost to mass shootings each year in the United States. In late 2021, I began to think more deeply about gun violence in our country, specifically the reality of mass shootings in this country versus elsewhere in the world.

Using information collected by the Gun Violence Archive, I plotted the data points from the calendar year of 2022 onto charts. These became graphic scores that created a framework for the sound of Mass — an arc of 12 speakers resting on 12 concrete cylinders. Each speaker vibrates an array of spent bullet casings with each composition movement, matching the frequency and intensity of shootings that occurred in each corresponding month. The intent for Mass is as much about the subject matter as it is about transforming cold, statistical data into something that the viewer feels in their body and hears with their ears. Mass was developed during my time as the sound artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.