Exhibition and Concert

Victoria Shen, Solo Exhibition

This exhibition features Victoria Shen’s mercurial instrumental inventions and performance videos. Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco. The artist explores the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body using analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls "chaotic sound" to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning. The exhibition will be accompanied by Shen’s concert on March 22, 2024 as the inaugural performance of AAI’s first Music and Writers Residency. In her live performances, she proposes an exploration between meaning and non-meaning through the physical activation of noise tropes. The appendage-like instruments and objects she makes exemplify Shen’s ability to embody through sound her interest in the tension created by opposition: control and chaos, the unique and the mass produced, the practical and the absurd.