Bio
Geneva Skeen is an artist and composer. Influenced by écriture féminine, alchemical metaphors, and a range of musical traditions ranging from holy mysticism to industrial, Skeen works with sound, voice, architecture, video, sculpture, and software. Her recordings, performances, publications, and installations focus on site-specific landscape studies as a means to highlight complex interdependencies between perception, attention, and trauma. Through linkages made between our finite physical landscapes and their infinitely permutable digital representations, these works explore qualities of embodiment amidst climate catastrophe and late capitalism.
Skeen has released musical works on Room40, LINE Imprint, Touch, Dragon’s Eye Recordings, and Crystalline Morphologies, which have been reviewed in The Wire Magazine, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, Foxy Digitalis, and others. She has presented work at LAXART, the Broad Museum, Open Space SFMOMA, LAND AND SEA, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Center for New Music San Francisco, REDCAT, and LACMA.
She is curator/founder of Sequencing, an online transmedia publication series for Fulcrum Arts which explores the intersection of art, science, and social change, and is a member of VOLUME—a curatorial collective focused on sound and time-based practices.
She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Artist Statement
As an artist, I am engrossed with the act of producing and listening to multiplicities. I seek to develop the sound of being “more-than-one” through an aesthetic matrix, and what insights sound might offer existentially and expressively. My field recording practice embraces ecological phenomena and physical spaces along with webcam chat rooms and live video streams; although sometimes these recordings stand alone, they are often woven into compositions created using voice, electronics, and software. The range of these materials is intentional––the production medium is the great aggregator. Technologies enable an expanded level of interconnectedness with both our tangible and intangible worlds, leading to a non-traditional embodiment that expands my musical vocabulary into a decentered language lingering outside the limits of bounded subjectivity.
Geneva is published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music, UK (publishing recorded sound-works wordwide).