Echo & Narcissus

About the Exhibition

“In the myth of Echo and Narcissus one sees the myth as about the relationship between specular image and voice, between sight and voice, between light and speech, between the reflection and the mirror.“  - Jacques Derrida

Translation is not a mimic, or a mirror, but an echo.

I stand in the gallery between Echo and Narcissus, icons of a meeting between bodies. Digital scans of the original stone sculptures are translated into sound by a program that turns their periphery into musical notes. The notes are generated in relation to the shape of the surface, creating a cipher for reproducing the form through sound.

Using these notes as a guide, I plot a circular matrix and transcribe them into three-dimensions. As this process unfolds, clay coils stack and shapes form line by line. The original objects become new figures. I listen to their sound, like Echo, and animate them from this sound. Like Narcissus, I merge object and reflection.

About the Artist

Stacy Jo Scott works to disrupt the presumed binary of the tangible materiality of clay and the intangible machinic code of emergent technologies. Her research explores the possibilities of using digital processes of material fabrication—such as custom generative software tools and unorthodox 3D printing techniques—to convey an unsettled history, eliciting a sense of poetic speculation and queer futurity. By embracing glitches and digital idiosyncrasies that interrupt the numeric logic of the machine, she aims to expand our collective understanding of what it means to be materially embodied in a world that is increasingly intertwined with technology.

Stacy Jo’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at Galleri ROM, Oslo, Norway; Holding Contemporary, Portland, OR; Design Fest, Gent, Belgium; Rockelman & Partner, Berlin, Germany; Thomas Hunter Projects in New York, NY; and upcoming at AB Projects, Los Angeles, CA. Her writing has been published in numerous publications online and in books and periodicals, and she has participated in various residencies including the Visiting Artists and Scholars Program at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and was previously a Franzen Fellow for Digital Craft at Colorado State University, a Lecturer at University of California, Berkeley, and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Ceramics at the University of Oregon.