The body is a score

Zoë LeBrun

Presented in partnership with Send + Receive: Festival of Sound

The body is a score is an audio installation that attempts to metaphorize the false dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity of the human body through language and sound.

Balancing algorithmic composition with improvised rhythms, LeBrun transposes bodies of text from anatomical textbooks, poetry, and personal writings into scores for flute and guitar. These compositions are accompanied by the sounds of the interior body, recorded using a stethoscope microphone, and Solfeggio tones–notes that are said to resonate with the Earth’s frequency.

Connected by breath, these vastly contrasting bodies are brought together with the aim of blurring somatic, textual, and metaphorical boundaries. Together, they speak to the ways in which we construct an understanding of what a body can be through language, and how we might subvert these restrictive representations by transmuting and expanding upon their forms. What results is the creation of an ever-evolving auditory body that changes over time depending on the presence and position of the listener within the installation.

About the Artist

Zoë LeBrun

Zoë LeBrun (she/they) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist practicing on Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Their process-based practice rests at the intersections of video, installation, and sound art. Through these mediums, LeBrun seeks to better understand the human condition, utilizing materials and processes which embody metaphors of lived experience and bodily function to do so.

The works LeBrun creates reveal themselves over time, underscoring themes such as temporality and existentialism and making the physical processes behind them indivisible from the conceptual core of their practice.

LeBrun’s work has been exhibited at aceartinc., Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art, and The School of Art Student Gallery. Their films have been screened at the Dave Barber Cinematheque, the Muriel Richardson Auditorium, the Winnipeg Art Gallery Rooftop, and at Graffiti Art Programming, where she has also performed live in their ongoing space)doxa programming. LeBrun holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the School of Art at the University of Manitoba and her work is held in private collections in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Vienna, Austria.