Art Theory: BVA 313 - 19/03/2019 (Presentation in Colour of sin)

Looking into Colour of sin: Headcase version Lisa Reihana

Based on her video:

What is special about these three 1970s headcase round hair dyers is that it amplifies sounds when your head is in the dome. A hairdryer sound dome. 

Her idea came by when she lost her studio. All she's able to work with was her computer, writing short stories at most of the time. The story is about a woman who had or having an afraid. Then a man ask "whats the colour of your sin?" This question reflects to what she has been asked before, and triggers her approach towards this questioning. 

At her exhibition in Auckland, she used this opportunity to create a sound track and a sound design piece based on her story. She project the sound in an atrium space but the space is too big. Causing the sound floats and bleeds out into the audience's ear.  

As a sound artist, it is important to capture the layers sound and shows it to their audience. What she did was working with a sound engineer to insert the sound into the hairdryer, making into a sculpture. They created this sound track THX 1138 to push the voice and sound through the sound barrier. 

The hair dryer represent a significant role in her work. First, it looks like the sci-fi genre design. Secondly, her mother. Her mom was a hair dresser before and Lisa found was women usually talks and gossip when getting their hair done under the dome. It is a real women space. Making these two element sits very well together. 

Emerge yourself into the work while listening through the dome. Creating this relationship between the sculpture and the audience, slowly the audience, too became a part of the sculpture. 

Liverpool Biennial of contemporary art:

Exhibtion- Stranger than fiction at Fact, 2008

It presented a number works that reference sensory deprivation, the unearthing of memory, objects and history, where the audience is invited to build their own connections in confronting the void. All the artworks contributed to the wider themes of abstraction and storytelling. 

1970’s hair dryers were converted to relay an intimate dialogue, exploring internal passions against the banality of external life: the details became increasingly fractured, while the compelling and provocative story probed conventional perceptions of gender, sexuality and identity.