BRUNSWICK — The Bowdoin College Museum of Art commissioned a site-specific, multimedia, dual art installation that is on display through Sept. 29, 2019.

Washington, D.C.-based contemporary artist linn meyers will create a large-scale wall drawing titled “Let’s Get Lost,” while serving as the 2018 halley k harrisburg ’90 and Michael Rosenfeld Artist-in-Residence at the College. Concurrently, interaction and sound artists Rebecca Bray, James Bigbee Garver and Josh Knowles, along with meyers, will create an interactive sound installation, “Listening Glass,” that corresponds with the wall drawing and features acoustic components activated through audience participation. 

For nearly 20 years, meyers has created large-scale wall drawings in public institutions and private collections. Using paint markers, she creates sprawling and oscillating linear patterns that activate spaces for visitors, reveal elements of a site’s architecture, and highlight the inevitable imperfections of the human gesture.

For “Let’s Get Lost,” meyers will use the four niches in the museum’s Charles Follen McKim-designed Walker Gallery to drive the composition of her wall drawing. Her drawn piece will take cues from “Listening Glass,” using the sound project to inform the composition of the drawing, thus turning sound into drawn gesture. 

Using a custom app with advanced digital audio software and augmented reality technology, “Listening Glass” allows museumgoers to interact with “Let’s Get Lost,” to generate sound, creating improvised collaborative musical compositions using the drawing as a score. With the app on a handheld device, “Listening Glass” transforms the museum visitors’ gestures into sound, rendering the audience-performers’ motions in sonic triggers, audio distortion, reverberation, arpeggiations and other expressive sonic events. The resulting sounds will emanate from each visitor’s iPhone, allowing sound and motion to connect audiences more fully to each other and to the drawn piece.

The project is a collaboration between the artists and the audience, pushing boundaries to create new compositional possibilities. In this dual exhibition, drawing is explored as a multi-sensory experience, inviting responses through sight, sound and movement. 

Fully accessible, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is open to the public free of charge from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday; and from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

linn myers working on the site-specific drawing “Let’s Get Lost” at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick. (Photo by Dennis Griggs, Tannery Hill Studio)

linn meyers (Photo by Cathy Carver)

Installation view of “Let’s Get Lost” by linn meyers at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. (Photo by Diana and Dennis Griggs)