A Kind of Ache
What would it feel like to be the majority?
A Kind of Ache, commissioned by The Clarice Center at the University of Maryland and supported by the Creative Work Fund, is an installation and concert length work created by composer Sarah Hennies, visual artist Terry Berlier, and TLES that deconstructs, reconstructs, and queers everyday objects in the service of creating and investigating the concept and possibility of creating “queer space.” Connected by a fascination with what they term queer objects—small thrift store hand bells and mis-matched pan lids—Hennies and Berlier collaborate in bringing these percussive objects together in a new installation imagining creating and demarcating a “queer-only” space, as this environment is nearly unattainable in every day life. What, ask the collaborating artists, would it feel like to be the majority?
Sarah Hennies, ComposerSarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Festival Cable (Nantes), send + receive (Winnipeg), O’ Art Space (Milan), Cafe Oto (London), ALICE (Copenhagen), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Cristian Alvear, Claire Chase, R. Andrew Lee, Talea Ensemble, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Two-Way Street, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.
Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.
She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received additional support from New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.
Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.
Terry Berlier, Interdisciplinary ArtistTerry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates the evolution of human interaction with queerness and ecologies. Orienting, disorienting, and reorienting, her work provides tools to recover and reanimate our faltering connections with self, queerness, nature, and society, often through humor.
She has exhibited in solo and group shows in North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia including at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Contemporary Art and Spirits in Osaka, Japan, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Stanford Art Gallery. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, the Zellerbach Foundation, and the Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship. Her work has been reviewed in the Art in America, BBC News Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, is published in the book ‘Seeing Gertrude Stein’ by Wanda Corn and Tirza Latimer through University of California Press, and ‘Slant Step Book: The Mysterious Object and The Artworks it Inspired’ by Francesca Wilmott and Phil Weidman. Her work is in several collections including the Kala Art Institute, University of Arizona, Tucson, Bildwechsel Archive in Berlin, Germany, and Progressive Corporation. She received a Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art from University of California, Davis and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Berlier is an Associate Professor and Director of the Sculpture Lab in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.
Memory Box
A collaborative companion curriculum
In conjunction with A Kind Of Ache, Andy Meyerson and Travis Andrews of The Living Earth Show, composer Sarah Hennies and artist Terry Berlier, developed a curriculum and collaborative project called Memory Box. Originally created with University of Maryland students to create sound and video elements based on personal memories, and objects that evoke a queer sensibility in preparation for The Clarice’s commission for 2021-22 A Kind of Ache, This open-source artmaking collaboration weaves music, video, objects, and LGBTQ+ issues into one artistic experience.