Renee D. Lauzon currently lives and works in Vermont. She received her MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts in August 2012. A writer, poet, researcher, and sound artist, Renee finds the intersection between language, speech acts, and news media fertile grounds for her aesthetic/political investigations in how we speak and how we listen within a culture of violence, difference, exploitation, war, and trauma. She recently completed a six-month project titled "If We Are Two, They Will Have to Believe Us," which is a two-channel audio installation composed within a single dark room with a white table, two black plastic chairs, two headphones, ceiling light, and four black "audience/spectator" chairs made of metal which supports a waiting area/jury while two co-listeners sit on either side of the white table to listen to two separate audio tracks which retell and recast the language that defines victimhood within the confines of the law.
“Giving Account/Bearing Witness” and “Definitions/Statistics” are two sides of the same story and each retelling plays with notions of truth and the real, of the credibility of giving accounts from two sides, the subjective and the objective. These two modes are not extreme polarities; they are two sides of the same event; they impinge upon each other; and after these affections immanently burst and fade, one can begin to know just how strongly they effect one’s notions of identity, time, memory, and truth, and how these notions relate to how our experiences are felt. The objective and subjective perform the same task: the forming of judgements. The way these judgements are formed, however, occurs in different sequences; from outside to inside and from inside to outside. Experience is a folding.
“If We Are Two” is also questioning notions of gendered speech. The female voice speaks listlessly, unaffected about highly affecting moments, moments that changes her view of the world forever. On the other side, a male’s voice speaks with an objective distance using terms and figures that begin to form a normativity; these facts seem stripped of selfhood but are about people’s experiences. By forming reversals within these speech acts in pre- and post-production, Renee is attempting to reframe the experience of language and comprehension -- questioning how much we can know of our experiences while they are happening, and what the processes of coming to know are after the event has perished, and how this process of thinking-feeling our experience shapes the ways we identify with the world.
Renee is looking for re-stagings of this installation/performance and is currently researching for other sound and video projects that are concerned with desire, pleasure, consent, and repetition.
“Giving Account/Bearing Witness” and “Definitions/Statistics” are two sides of the same story and each retelling plays with notions of truth and the real, of the credibility of giving accounts from two sides, the subjective and the objective. These two modes are not extreme polarities; they are two sides of the same event; they impinge upon each other; and after these affections immanently burst and fade, one can begin to know just how strongly they effect one’s notions of identity, time, memory, and truth, and how these notions relate to how our experiences are felt. The objective and subjective perform the same task: the forming of judgements. The way these judgements are formed, however, occurs in different sequences; from outside to inside and from inside to outside. Experience is a folding.
“If We Are Two” is also questioning notions of gendered speech. The female voice speaks listlessly, unaffected about highly affecting moments, moments that changes her view of the world forever. On the other side, a male’s voice speaks with an objective distance using terms and figures that begin to form a normativity; these facts seem stripped of selfhood but are about people’s experiences. By forming reversals within these speech acts in pre- and post-production, Renee is attempting to reframe the experience of language and comprehension -- questioning how much we can know of our experiences while they are happening, and what the processes of coming to know are after the event has perished, and how this process of thinking-feeling our experience shapes the ways we identify with the world.
Renee is looking for re-stagings of this installation/performance and is currently researching for other sound and video projects that are concerned with desire, pleasure, consent, and repetition.
