Ghostmail is a public installation that facilitates messages between the living and the dead. The last year has been filled with collective loss including the passing of artist Paige Naylor’s own partner in October of 2020. She says, “I find myself in a constant state of preservation: gathering letters, videos, and voice messages shared between us. This process of revisiting history and of archiving acts as a temporary salve for my desire to connect with the one I have lost. I wish to collectively create an archive of lost voices extracted from voicemails, videos, or related media.” This installation, which is part of the 2021 Terrain Biennial, will serve as a public sound archive to connect us to those we have lost.
THIS IS A CALL for voicemails, videos, pictures of handwritten notes, screenshots of text messages or any media containing the physical or representational voices of those in our Chicagoland community (and beyond) we have lost this past year or in recent past. Please note that any audio sent will be potentially included in both a physical installation and digital archive.
Please send materials and/or questions to hi.ghostmail@gmail.com
About Paige Naylor
Paige Naylor is a Chicago-based artist and educator working within the realms of sound, performance, video, and writing. She is an MFA candidate in the Sound Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago specializing in voice and electronics. Paige is currently interested in self-regulating systems, participatory performance, social intervention, installation, real-time song de/reconstruction, auditory illusions, movement & text scores, aesthetics of joy, death, ephemerality, loss, and facilitations of healing. She holds a certificate in Deep Listening from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is composer-performer & co-producer of the experimental pop opera The Near Misses.
Paige has exhibited work and performed at Experimental Sound Studio, Elastic Arts, IMPACT Performance Festival, ADDS Donna, School of the Art Institute, Links Hall, No Nation Tangential Unspace Art Lab, Vox Populi, Black Iris, Baltimore Theatre Project, D.C. Arts Center, Open Signal as well as through programs such as The Quarantine Concerts, Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Parks, Lumpen Radio Twitch, and Telemetry Music Series.
About the Terrain Biennial
Since 2013, the Terrain Biennial has been a nexus between art practitioners and public audiences from seemingly disparate backgrounds through public art installations. This work has forged connections in substantial and empathetic ways across city borders around the world. The 2021 Terrain Biennial aims to find spaces of joy and community essential for collective healing in these times of isolation, public reckonings, and mourning. Sharing much of the same sentiment as yearbook signatures and pen pal letters, Terrain brings you K.I.T. (keep in touch)…
In 2021, Terrain asks that participants reflect on how their projects might serve as letters to their community and communities in the Terrain network around the world. They also want to encourage people to consider that after more than a year of lockdown, their projects and installations are ways to encourage tactile, lived experiences of art in addition to mediated, screen based moments. The Biennial thinks about how we can keep in touch with each other, deepen our friendships, and build new connections.
Terrain Biennial, initiative of Terrain Exhibitions, was founded in 2013 by artist Sabina Ott. The biennial was created on a volunteer basis in the spirit of community building through free and accessible public art installations and events staged in residential neighborhoods across the U.S. and worldwide.
