Margaret Noble (artist)

Margaret Noble
Born 1972 (age 43–44)
Waco, Texas
Nationality American
Education University of California, San Diego (BA)
School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA)
Movement Sound art
Installation art
Sound sculpture
Website margaretnoble.net

Margaret Noble (born 1972)[1] is an American sound artist, installation artist, electronic music composer and former house music DJ. She is based in San Diego, California.

Early life and education

Noble was born in Waco, Texas,[2][3] and grew up in the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego,[4] moving there in 1982 at the age of 9.[2] She earned a BA in philosophy from the University of California at San Diego, and an MFA in sound art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007.[5][6] Her training in dance and participation in the rave scene in the 1990s inspired her to make music. She taught herself to use turntables.[5]

Career

House music (2002-07)

As a house music DJ, Noble performed internationally at underground clubs.[7][8] In 2002, she moved to Chicago, Illinois, to pursue the house music scene there.[8] She had several nightclub DJ residencies and hosted a monthly showcase,[7] performing alongside DJs including DJ Spooky and Derrick Carter.[5][9] She spent five years as a DJ in Chicago.[10] After earning a master's in sound art and, following art residencies in Europe, in 2007 she moved to San Diego to teach media production at High Tech High School in Point Loma while continuing her sound art practice.[2][5][11]

Frakture (2009-10)

In 2009, Noble created an experimental radio piece that blended industrial noises, recorded dialogue and connective music, with eight speakers in surround sound, as a remix of a 1953 vinyl recording of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.[8] In 2010, she released Frakture, an eight-track audio collage of analog synthesizer, acoustic drums, recordings of healthcare protests, contemporary political propaganda, emergency alarms, the New York Stock Exchange, dice rolling and other sounds, based on a radio play adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four.[5][12][13] On the recording, Noble reads excerpts from the text of Orwell's novel.[14] The first track of Frakture, "Safer is Better", won first place in the 2013 Electronic Music Composition Contest from Canada's Musicworks magazine.[12][15]

Sound art and installations (2012-present)

In August 2012, Noble's installation 44th and Landis opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The large-scale multimedia art piece combined Victorian-style paper dolls with 1980s urban influences based on her upbringing in San Diego's City Heights neighborhood, and included a performance by Noble.[4][14] The show's visual centerpiece was a hanging series of 100 paper dolls, along with paper-doll clothing, objects and architecture.[16]

In her 2016 interactive piece What Lies Beneath, she worked in sound sculpture, creating a tall wooden box with instructions next to it to raise the lid, which caused sounds of organ pipes, truck brakes and other dissonance to emit. The person interacting with it can control the sound with the lid, with a "storm" inside the box.[1]

Her piece Head in the Sand features a wooden box sitting on four legs with a head-sized hole in the top and instructions to put your head in the hole and wait. Inside is a chambered light and sound show, with soft pastoral sounds, the hole serving as a sanctuary from the art exhibit itself.[1] Head in the Sand was included in her 2016 exhibition Resonating Objects at South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia, Washington. The exhibition was an interactive mixture of sound, sculpture and video. It also included I Long to Be Free From Longing and Material Shrine for the New Class, which features dangling objects the visitor can squeeze to activate different sounds.[17]

Her 2016 sound art installation Time Strata, a public art commission for The Port of San Diego at the Cesar Chavez Park pier in San Diego consists of three sound sculptures made of materials including vintage buoys, hunks of bamboo, bells, stainless steel and harp strings, along with sounds of creatures like snapping shrimp in the water under the pier. Microphones are placed around the pier, with the sound fed into a mixer and then into four digital consoles where participants can sample and alter the sounds.[18]

Other notable pieces include The Collector, where Noble worked with puppeteers Animal Cracker Conspiracy and visual directors Bridget Rountree and Iain Gunn, creating a multi-layered soundscape that used animated video, live video projection and puppetry to tell a story of a debt collector;[19] Righteous Exploits, a 2013 experimental performance created with Justin Hudnall, using a combination of live audio and video multimedia and performance art;[20] and her 2014 interactive sound installation I Long to Be Free From Longing, which won first place in the 23rd annual Juried Exhibition at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in San Diego.[21]

Discography

Albums

Compilations

Exhibitions and performances

Solo shows

Group shows and collaborations (selected)

Honors and awards

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Thomas Larson, "Noisy Margaret Noble seeks friend not foe," San Diego Reader, June 8, 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 James Chute, "Artist Margaret Noble knows City Heights," San Diego Union-Tribune, June 16, 2012.
  3. 1 2 Margaret Noble, Culture Hall. Accessed October 23, 2016.
  4. 1 2 3 James Chute, "Margaret Noble embarks on large-scale work for Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego," San Diego Union-Tribune, March 24, 2012.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Kinsee Morlan, "Margaret Noble records, listens and revises," San Diego City Beat, November 24, 2010.
  6. ↑ Jordan Anthony Swain, "Margaret Noble + Sound Art + Installation," Vanichi, May 27, 2015.
  7. 1 2 Meredith Hattam, "Sushi's 'Fresh Sound' Music Series Blends Big Brother And A Golden Voice," KPBS TV, January 4, 2010.
  8. 1 2 3 Dave Good, "She Has 1984 on Vinyl," San Diego Reader, December 23, 2009.
  9. ↑ Lisa Skolnik, "Spin Doctor," Chicago Tribune, February 6, 2005.
  10. ↑ James Chute, "Creating '44th and Landis' provided Margaret Noble with an art education," San Diego Union-Tribune, August 11, 2012.
  11. ↑ Mat Honan, "Found: The Future of Children's Book," Wired, April 19, 2010.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Jennie Punter, "Margaret Noble's Safer Is Better," Musicworks, Spring 2014, issue 118.
  13. ↑ Rob Maguire, "George Orwell's 80s Remix," Art Threat, February 8, 2011.
  14. 1 2 3 Camille Tallon, "Interview: Margaret Noble," Manor House Quarterly, pp. 45-49, Summer 2012.
  15. ↑ Ian Holubiak, "Canada's Musicworks Magazine Announces 2013 Electronic Music Composition and 'Sonic Geography' Writing Winners, Margaret Noble and Caitlin Smith," Classicalite, February 11, 2014.
  16. ↑ AnnaMaria Stephens, "The Exhibitionists," Riviera, July/August 2012, pp. 78-80.
  17. 1 2 Molly Gilmore, "Visitors, sound part of the art in 'Resonating Objects'," The Olympian, September 22, 2016.
  18. ↑ Susan Myrland, "Fall arts 2016: Up close with artist Margaret Noble," San Diego Union-Tribune, September 13, 2016.
  19. 1 2 Lily Janiak, "Occupy Fringe Theatre 2012: The Good, the Bad, and the Glowy," SF Weekly, September 10, 2012.
  20. 1 2 Carissa Casares, Maureen Cavanaugh, "Weekend Preview: Righteous Exploites, Stay Strange and The Big Read," KPBS TV, April 11, 2013.
  21. 1 2 James Chute, "Noble gets top prize in Athenaeum exhibition," San Diego Union-Tribune, August 14, 2014.
  22. ↑ "Margaret Noble at Mute Gallery Lisbon, Portugal," solomusicgallery.com, August 4, 2016.
  23. ↑ "Eight reasons to check out Art San Diego," San Diego City Beat, November 6, 2013.
  24. ↑ "Alex Prager, San Diego Fermentation Festival and Cognitive Camouflage," San Diego City Beat, January 26, 2015.
  25. ↑ Megan Burke, "San Diego Artists Take On Drought In New Central Library Exhibit," KPBS-TV, September 22, 2015.

External links

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