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Jack Straw New Media Gallery
Cameron Perry Fraser: Large String Array
October 2 - December 18, 2020
Visits by appointment only, M-F, 10am-5:30pm
Call 206-634-0919 or email jsp@jackstraw.org to schedule a visit
Zoom Youth and Family Workshop: Saturday, December 19, 2pm
Free instrument-making workshop, held online via Zoom. Email education@jackstraw.org for more information.
It is easy and fun to build your own instruments! This workshop is about how instruments work. We will discuss four types of instruments and how to build each of them using objects you can find around the house. We will also talk about the making of Large String Array. Please join us!
Streaming events (via Facebook Live)
Virtual Opening: Friday, October 2 (Archived video)
Artist Talk: Friday, October 23, 7pm (Archived video) |


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Twelve hundred piano strings reach from floor to ceiling in Large String Array, transforming the Jack Straw New Media Gallery into an automatic resonant instrument that plays a story of life in a pandemic. An ensemble of twelve discrete voices reverberates throughout the room, each pulled directly from the windows, walls and wires of Cameron's home while sheltered in place. Custom high-gain amplifiers and contact microphones were developed to listen in to faint transmissions of daily life. Large String Array reimagines this cloistered soundscape as a tone poem transfigured through steel wire.
The story of quarantine sounds out through the tension of home when it is both cage and privilege, a refuge coated with a thin membrane of isolation. The early eerie quiet of pandemic gives way to the protests against police violence and systemic racism — the whisper of social distance becomes the screams for social justice. The sounds of stillness and rage and pain join together in this meditation on isolation and solidarity.
Cameron Perry Fraser is a composer, sculptor, engineer and sound artist who designs handmade acoustic/electric instruments, digital interfaces and sonorous instillations. His work often employs ecoacoustic strategies, indeterminate methods and feedback systems. Cameron is currently a Doctoral Candidate at DXARTS, University of Washington. He received his masters from Columbia University's Sound Arts program and worked at Columbia’s Computer Music Center
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Jack Straw Cultural Center gratefully acknowledges the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4Culture King County Lodging Tax Fund, WA State Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, ArtsFund, Humanities Washington and the National Endowment for the Humanities CARES funding, and individual contributors for their support of Jack Straw Artist Programs.
This project was produced with additional support from DXARTS.

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Recent exhibitions
IRISIRIS (Online exhibit lauched July 24, 2020) by Julia Freeman
Natural Individuals (February 14-March 27, 2020) by Yunmi Her
Golden Lady: A Retrospective into the Life & Loves of Catherine Harris-White to Date (January 31-February 7, 2020)
Aren't They All Just Love Songs Anyway? (October 4 - December 11, 2019) by Naima Lowe
The Final Image (August 9 - September 20, 2019) by Martin Jarmick
To Take the Shape of the Container (April 5 - June 8, 2019) by Erin Elyse Burns
Piano Drop (February 11 - March 17, 2019)
Silicone Love - Her Garden (September 7-November 9, 2018) by Chun Shao
to drown (June 1-July 13, 2018) by L Koo
Brain Goreng (April 13-May 18, 2018) by Matthew Thomas Shoemaker
blind film (February 9-March 30, 2018) by Sangjun Yoo
Mikawa (September 29-December 8, 2017) by Garrett Fisher and Tori Ellison
The New Landscape: Reconstructed Ecologies(June 16- August 4, 2017) by Roger Feldman and Jeff Roberts
Meditations on Water (April 14 - June 2, 2017) by City Meditation Crew with Vaughn Bell
Forgetting of Being (January 13 - March 24, 2017) by Rachel Green and Daniel Salo
CASTING SHADOWS (September 9 - October 28, 2016) by E.T. Russiani
Previous exhibitions
About the Jack Straw New Media Gallery
The Jack Straw New Media Gallery, located in Seattle's University District at Jack Straw Cultural Center, opened in 1999 to support artists working with visual and installation art, with an emphasis on sound. Click here to listen to our New Media Gallery artist podcasts and learn more about the gallery, the residency program, and previous artists.
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