ROOM TONE ambient sound collages by Shanna Compton
June 1–30 at Anodyne
175 W. Main St., Searsport ME
Artist reception & Deep Whoosh book launch: Saturday, June 21, 5–7 p.m.
Save the dates! I’ll be at Anodyne on Sunday, June 1, to hang the show if you’d like to stop by for an early look and chat.
The exhibition will run all month, June 1–30, and on Saturday, June 21st there will be a reception and book launch party from 5 to 7. In addition to the dozen (or so!) collages I’ll have in the show, Anodyne will have copies of the full series available in my new artist book, Deep Whoosh (Black Square Editions, August 2025).
More about the exhibition, the book, and the reception as the date rolls closer. For now, I need to get framing.
Hope to see you there!
ARTIST STATEMENT (adapted from the essay in the book)
“When I first began to lose my hearing, it was very gradual. I lived in a very busy, very loud place (Brooklyn, NYC), which I figured sufficiently explained why I sometimes had difficulty catching things. But it became clear over time that I was missing more than I was catching. In conversations, I made mistakes—sometimes responding in nonsensical ways. Some of the mistakes I made were embarrassing, but some were funny, or interesting. I was receiving fragments of speech not just from the people in front of me, but from somewhere else—in the sense that what I thought I heard I was actually mishearing. I’d invented it. I began to think of mishearing as a kind of writing.
“I got my first hearing aids in 2012, and I leaned into the tech. I was fascinated by the audiologist’s explanation of how ‘small, insignificant sounds’ would be amplified by my brain as I got used to my aids, because it would focus on ‘what it’s been missing.’ Eventually I’d become accustomed to the new information, she said, just keep using the aids and allow the brain to adjust. The first things that were too loud: the clicking of the blinker as we drove home from the appointment, the electronic whine of the appliances in the kitchen, the rustling of paper on my desk, all the creaking of our very old Victorian rental house. The first things that made me weep: a dog barking from the next street over, the string arrangement behind the vocals in a song I loved, the varying rhythms of his breathing, sighs, and nearly silent laughter when he was sitting close to me. For a while, all these missing things became primary. I knew I’d been frustrated about missing bits of speech, but I was surprised to discover how much I missed ‘incidental noise,’ how much meaning is carried through ambient sounds. I learned that the cues we get from these ‘background sounds’ play an astonishingly large role in how I move and feel my way through the world.
“So when I began reading sounds, in the form of closed captions, the temptation to elevate them as both bits of language and visual snippets naturally led to me incorporating them into both poems and cut-and-paste collages. Nonverbal sound effects in CC and SDH are especially fascinating bits of language. I jot them down while watching movies. Sometimes I invent my own.”