Hommage à Kenneth Noland / Judy Dunaway

Judy Dunaway performs avant-garde compositions and free improvisations on amplified latex balloons played as musical instruments and also presents them in a sound installation context. She is known internationally as a “virtuoso of the balloon.” She plays a variety of shapes and sizes of balloon instruments, each with it’s own special qualities, pushing the extremes of both pitch range and artistic limits. Her large rubbed “tenor” balloon gives Jimmy Hendrix’s guitar a run for the money and her giant balloon pulsates into the depths of the subaudio. Her abstract music and sounds are difficult to equate with other forms, depending upon the perception of the individual like the images seen in fire or clouds.

As Steina Vasulka merged violin, sound, video and technology in “Violin Power,” at Vasulka Kitchen Judy will present two works using balloons, sound, video and technology. Her interactive performance work “Hommage à Kenneth Noland” (2015) for amplified giant balloon, vibrators, synthesized tones and projected video animations features a sensual mechanical drone coupled to the resonant frequencies of the giant balloon highlighted with variable harmonics that influence the slowly mutating projections. She will also present her real-time animation projection piece entitled “Stripes”, that turns her Tenor Balloon instrument into a 3-D video
piece.

In addition to her performance, Judy will give a talk about connections between her work with balloons and her research on the history of Sound Art, with a particular focus on Nam June Paik’s video works analyzed as musical composition and her recently published paper concerning 1979’s “Sound Art” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.