In May 2019, Jack Straw and Arts and Visually Impaired Audiences (AVIA) presented an accessible art workshop at Jack Straw in conjunction with Erin Elyse Burns’s exhibit To Take the Shape of the Container, which combined sculpture, video, and sound effects created in the studio to emphasize minute details one might fixate upon when the noise of city life is absent.

At the beginning of the workshop, AVIA’s Jesse Minkert described the exhibit for all the participants, including the video projections and the sculptural elements, and Erin discussed her inspirations and process. One they’d experienced the whole exhibit, students went into the studio with Erin, Jesse, and Jack Straw’s engineers to create their own sound effects and record short spoken phrases and words that arose from experiencing the installation.

Next, Erin led the students in a tactile artmaking activity using ribbon and wooden armatures, inspired by the large sculpture in the gallery, which Erin made from five miles of black ribbon. At the end, everyone went into the gallery with their sculptures and listened back to the soundscape they’d created in the gallery space.

    

Artists

Exhibits