Circling the Center by Nene Humphrey

Brooklyn-based artist Nene Humphrey's most recent series/project/performance/exhibition, Circling the Center is motivated by collaboration in every sense of the word. This project's origins began with a residency at Joseph LeDoux's neuroscience laboratory at New York University where Humphrey worked with scientists to visualize recorded images from the amygdala, the part of the brain where emotion, fear and anxiety reside. From these images Humphrey has created a series of layered drawings and sculptural works entitled The Plain Sense of Things. Inspired by Wallace Stevens' poem of the same name which brings us back to the simpler things in life, Humphrey's work moves us back through some of the most interesting, poignant, and fundamental examples of the origins of communication, linkage, and remembrance. Circling the Center, installation image, 2009.

For the inaugural site-specific installation of Circling the Center at Pinnacle Gallery, over sixty SCAD students, faculty, alumni and staff are participating in an exceptional feat of collaboration with Humphrey, artist Julie DeLano and sound design artist and musician Roberto Lange. Together, participants learn Victorian hair braiding patterns, woven with various colors and gauges of wire, made using simple looms. Seated in a tight circle of eight weavers, reminiscent of historical drum circles, the circumference expands as the woven sculpture grows, hanging from the center of the space. Like a ripple effect, sound also emanates from the core of the weaving group producing an intricate fusion of human chanting, spooling, spools hitting the sides of the looms, spools clanking and crashing to the floor, and the muffled thud of them hitting the felted tops of the looms. The sounds Humphrey collected and recorded from the emotional responses of lab mice make up the base sound from which Lange then records the actions in the gallery from the weavings, integrating them together to create an additional layer to this work.
Circling the Center, spools.

The work largely encompasses Humphrey's continued investigation of emotional responses through an interpretation of the patterning of the mind that we can not see with our naked eye. The results are an astonishingly beautiful forest of woven wire braids that undulate down from a suspended ceiling structure. Dark at the core, the intricate web of thicker dark wire, and wispy silver wire, are accented by bursts of red shimmers in the light, to reveal a structure that unites individual works by a large group of people from various disciplines. The linchpin of the exhibition is the haunting sound composition that Roberto Lange has arranged to accompany this new work.

Lange has spent the last week of the project making the aforementioned recordings which have now come together to reveal a mantra tied into Circling the Center. It is that of the sound, the energy that resonates from the research, the tools and the people associated with this project. Voices recorded in French, Russian, English and Chinese reveal simple chants that the participants murmur to themselves as they methodically move the spooled wire into position for weaving specific hair braiding patterns. These chants are intended not only to guide the weaver through the steps of a particular braid but they also give a voice the the piece, a way in which the ear may hear and in turn be able to have the mind understand more about how all of these factors tie into Humphrey's larger concepts of memory and emotion. Along with the voices of those chanting, Lange has integrated the other noises associated with making these woven braids in order to give a sense of work, a sense of a collective effort of motion and making inherent in the overall concept of this project.

In terms of understanding Circling the Center as a way to visualize that which is not visible, Humphrey has given the viewer a myriad of avenues from which to traverse this concept. Sound, touch, visual information and historical context come together to create a unified experience, one grounded in collaboration and interdisciplinary exploration. Circling the Center will be exhibited until Dec. 30, 2009 at Pinnacle Gallery | 320 E. Liberty (corner of Liberty and Habersham). The exhibition will travel to Sharidan Art Gallery, Kutztown, PA.