Shannon Schmidt is part of Exposed 2011. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
In the extreme cold, in the extreme winter, the body and mind survive the loss of sunlight, warmth, and the forest’s density. On a land of ice and frozen water, Lake Ojibwe in northern Minnesota, the figure stands until numbness crawls over the lower limbs of legs and feet, until a jaw of ice is unable to sustain its wide-open expression.
This is the setting of cold song, a video and performance, based on a meditation of silent screaming, the psychology of the inarticulate, and primal urges within the body and mind. The soundtrack plays a combination of texts that exist as multiple voices. The voices sing a cold song that repeats, interrupts itself, and then fades out: a fragmented poetic song and the quiet of winter. The song exists as a sparse field of language that becomes landscape, hair, the body, and seasons. The song’s words call back to the creation of one’s own language or what Deleuze describes as “its new syntax as a language within language.”
This piece is not about logic. In many ways it is about the how the body and mind fumble toward a non-sensical sense in response to loss: an experience of affect and the inarticulate. In its construction, it is both haunting and beautiful, as well as a document of contradictions.
Shannon Schmidt is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Currently based in Chicago, she recently exhibited The Ways of Connecting the Floor to the Ceiling, a collaborative installation using raw wool and wood flooring; her poems and art reviews have appeared in Cairo On the Length (exhibition catalogue), Text Off the Page 2006–2009, Art Talk Chicago and Chicago Art Magazine. Her videos have been exhibited in collaboration with other artists at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and Dynamo Project Space in Thessaloniki, Greece, as well as the Sullivan Galleries in Chicago. Shannon received her MFA and MFA in Writing (2009) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
ABOUT EXPOSED
For the past twenty years, the Helen Day Art Center has hosted an outdoor public art and sculpture exhibition called Exposed in Stowe, Vermont. Exposed hosts sculptures, site-specific installations, and participatory work from twenty-three national and international artists. the 2011 edition offers a series of Thursday night events by 12 video artists, writers, performers, and musicians accompany the exhibit. This exhibition and series of events is accompanied by cell phone audio tours, QR codes, walking tour maps, walkabouts, and a catalogue of the exhibit published by Kasini House Books. The exhibition will take place July 8th to October 8th, 2011.