Please join us for an artist talk & listening session with John Roach in conversation with Catherine Telford Keogh, as part of NARS Entree Encore Alumni series.
June 21, 6pm
in the NARS Project Space.
John Roach will discuss his solo exhibition Scorched Honey Archive, in conversation with artist Catherine Telford Keogh. A listening session of John Roach’s 2021 multichannel audio work COLONY will follow.
Scorched Honey Archive is a multisensory meditation on human disruption of pollinator ecology. It pairs a tapestry of wall-mounted steel plates forming a rough map of beekeeping hotspots in the United States, with the sound of burning honey quietly spatialized through eight fragrant beeswax speakers. Each sound that emerges, played at a volume teetering on the edge of audibility, corresponds to one of the steel plates bearing the charred honey remains.
John Roach is a Queens-based artist and educator whose work is concerned with the often slippery role of sound in how we perceive the world. His most recent projects have explored the ability of sound to construct immersive portraits of places, and how the careful assembly of spatialized field recordings, sound design elements, and voices can connect a listener to unexpected impressions of a landscape or soundscape. Roach received his MFA from Hunter College. His work has been exhibited at Urban Glass, Parkers Box, Flux Factory, NARS, Local Project, Leslie Heller Gallery in New York; The Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, GlazenHuis in Lommel, Belgium; and The RMIT Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. He has completed residencies at Zion National Park in Utah; Triangle Artist Workshop in Salem, New York; Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington; Tacoma Museum of Glass; Uncommon Arts Residency in Jackson Wyoming; NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, New York; The Ionion Center for Art and Culture in Kefalonia Greece; and Marble House Project in Dorset Vermont. As an educator Roach teaches at Parsons School of Design and has taught workshops at Urban Glass and Pilchuck Glass School.
Catherine Telford Keogh (born 1986, Toronto, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores systems of containment, circulation and consumption that structure the bonds between language, biomatter, commodity objects, and waste. She received an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art and an MAR in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Yale University. She has held recent solo exhibitions at Helena Anrather, New York; Roberta Palen, Toronto; University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Waterloo, and also exhibited at the Bronx Museum, New York, Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal and Interstate, New York. She is an artist-in-residence at the Pelling Laboratory for Augmented Biology at the University of Ottawa where she is examining the bacterial metabolism of waste.