The Lamar Dodd School of Art is pleased to announce an ongoing collaboration between Christina Foard, MFA Candidate, and Mark Mobley, Co-Director of the ACES program. Foard's ongoing project Imagination Squared: Pathways to Resilience, is a free, city-wide social ecology project that collects public perceptions of resilience through visual symbols and stories. When the project evolved by adding a sound module to better capture the culture of Athens, Foard and Mobley decided to collaborate by prompting Mobley’s "Music in the Real World" students to create 40 second sound compilations on their perceptions of resilience.

“The students, whether composers, performers, educators, or therapists, came up with thoughtful, creative, poignant, and at times humorous responses to the prompt, ‘What does resilience sound like?’” said Foard.

Mobley offered that responding to this abstract prompt, “[The project] makes each participant think like a composer — an important perspective for every musician to explore." The resulting sound files are as varied as the students themselves. Some students used their musical abilities to exemplify resilience, whereas others incorporated voices from their heroes, or recorded themselves doing something that resonated as a symbol for resilience.

Check out the following audio responses to “What Does Resilience Sound Like?"

Sample one by Kathryn Buchanan

Sample two by Maggie Watts

Sample three by Paul Di Cicco

Imagination Squared:Pathways to Resilience is associated with The Social Ecology Studio and was one of the first projects to start working in the studio when it opened in 2017. Professor Michael Marshall, Director of the Social Ecology Studio stated, “Visual and performing arts often initiate engagement through an emotional, visceral response. People feel it first, and the intellect comes second, transcending verbal language and bridging across social, cultural and economic demographics. These form the basis of the experience of the arts. At that level, the Dodd and Hodgson are very much in alignment in mission and goals, fostering a conducive environment for collaboration.”

Each of these audio pieces from Mobley’s music classes are available on imaginationsquared.org by clicking on the sound symbols that are peppered throughout the visual grid on the homepage. Approximately 110 audio files will be loaded into their own "sound squares” and exhibited with hundreds of other visual squares on September 10, 2020 at the Lyndon House Arts Center. Foard hopes to find a permanent location for this colorful collection of public squares as a snapshot of Athens’ individual and collective notions of resilience.

Marshall added, “The project becomes most dynamic when these squares are hung collectively together. The installation of hundreds of these squares forms an expression of the challenges and the resilience of the entire community. Each individual is able to identify their square, their voice, their hardships and their resilience within the collective of the community, while acknowledging everyone else's voice and the unique, yet shared strength of resilience of the community that they are part of.”