160 Years of Pressure

160 YEARS OF PRESSURE  is a series of sound and video installation in collaboration with sound artist, writer, and graphic essayist Krista Dragomer.

Description:

Badasht, north of Tehran – 95 miles

Seneca Falls, north of New York – 270 miles

In 1848, a woman in Iran by the name of Tahirih unveiled her face in a group of men in a proclamation of undeniable equality.

In 1848, a group of women in the United States, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright, and Jane Hunt met for tea and began the women’s suffrage movement.

160 Years of Pressure parallels that wavelike motion now set in the intimate, personal space of one woman. The sound, video, drawings, and objects that comprise the project, in total, explore isolated moments of self-reflection, repulsion, confusion, outrage, and desire, and the building pressure of that tumult.  It is our response to what has or has not taken place since the circumstances in 1848.

Since the inception of this project in 2008 we have been working with the sound and images in ways that subvert the cohesion of images as primary sources of information.  The pairing of audio and visual, each operating within its own structure of tension allows for perceptions of power to shift between the two elements.  The sounds and images continuously modify each other, in a poetic structure more empathic than explanatory.