Ari Albertson 2025

Abstract

"synovia" is rooted in a clay practice I've been engaging in for the past year where I work with my eyes closed. Working in this way puts me into a unique and immersive flow state, and a direct tactile relationship with the material, resulting in forms that are surprising, intimate, and exciting. I consider this clay practice an extension of dance. Free expressive movement, whether at an ecstatic dance gathering or at the club, is one major access point for me to this state of embodied presence, or flow, or what I'm calling betweenity (a term I've adapted from Loren Chasse). Betweenity is characterized by a balance of embodiment, transcendence, groundedness, and interpermeability. Betweenity is interested in the ever-emergent rather than assumptions and preconceptions. I'm interested in the dancefloor as one access point to betweenity. I'm interested in the somatosensory experience of the dancefloor, of the sounds, lights, colors, feelings and motions of the dancefloor. I'm also interested in a theoretical expansion of the dancefloor as a conceptual site, a site of potentiality, a space for chance, experimentation, transformation, chimaerical and alchemical amalgamation. The furthest and most ambitious extensions of this inquiry ask what it might mean to see the dancefloor, and the betweenity it reveals, as a possible paradigm, a way of acting and interacting that might lead us into a more just, sensitive, radical and subversive sensibility.

Formally, "synovia" is a sound and sculpture installation, consisting of 18 ceramic sculptures suspended through the space, many of which contain small speakers. The sound installation consists of subtle sounds moving around the space via these tiny speakers as well as a foundation of low-frequency sound played through a subwoofer. The installation is meant to invoke betweenity and the dancefloor in a highly abstracted manner – the formal choices are intended to evoke sensations of interaction, intimacy, inhabiting your body among other bodies, and feelings of perceptual relation: distance, proximity, and the space between these relations.