The Sonorous Figures of Michael Hersch's "Images From A Closed Ward"

Michael Herch’s “IMAGES FROM A CLOSED WARD”
Performed by Flux Quartet with special guest Ah Young Hong singing works of Cage, Feldman, and Lassus. Presented by Crane Arts and the  Icebox Project Space. Sunday, December 16, 2018
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In the beginning, muddied abstractions of human figures, dark marks create bodies that are alive but not fully human. Etchings and lithographs of Rhode Island psychiatric inmates from the 1960's record a not too distant past, made alive through a quartet's sonic haunting. Strings and vocals narrate images, embodying the “other”. Instruments combine and pull apart with a momentum that plays to our thresholds of adrenaline and empathy.

In the images of Mazur's "Closed Ward", bars on windows and stripes on institutional clothes are a reminder of the quest for a sense of order in the individual that is somehow not created by the “outside world”. The atmosphere of the characters is stark isolation littered across crumbling, desolate walls, and even more chilling, in groups occupying disconnected worlds. Repeat phrases like, “This winter all the snowmen turn to stone” pair with rows of bare planks, grave markers for those who died presumably in institution, never finding their way out of a “rehabilitative” environment. At one point, a frame of eyes stares out at the audience, slowly enlarging, and we the viewers become watched, more aware of our spectatorship and implied responsibility. “This winter all the snowmen turn to stone”. Empty beds and rows of toothbrushes become more personal in light of the deceased. Then suddenly we are slammed with intensity, both in sound and in images of brain scans, accompanied by details like age, gender, diagnosis, and death date. This sudden specificity thrusts the viewer into comparison by broad strokes of demographic, and such common, murky categories like “undifferentiated depression”. Now, we are helpless to find lines that bar us from them, or anyone else for that matter. “Canaries beat their bars and scream”. At times white projection space and performers' breath between movements gives space for our hearts to catch up with us. Book-ending vocal works and the only color image used, that of a blossoming flower, provide for the viewer a subtle circular narrative and drop of hope. With it, a sense that while these images and emotions are dire and current, as well as horrific and historic, we can locate our agency in the ability to bear witness to a deep, resonant sadness, and to carry it with us into a brighter future.

Find more about the show at the Icebox Project Space website.

written by Sarah Muehlbauer
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