Sicut Quod: "As Above, So Below"

For Open House weekend at Oak Woods Cemetery, Whitney Johnson remembers the powerful leaders of Chicago alongside the unnamed residents of the Chicago Orphan Asylum. In her 4.1-channel sound installation Sicut Quod, Whitney Johnson extends the hermetic philosophy of correspondences to unite those who remember with those who are remembered. The work sonifies the water cycle as a system of correspondences between the four lakes of the cemetery, field recordings from the artist’s own history in the Allegheny Mountains, and the substance of human life. “As above, so below.” 

From 1-2 pm, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart, and Whitney Johnson will listen and respond to the installation with string instruments and voices, honoring the city, this memorial site, and all those who are remembered here. The installation can be heard all day on Saturday, October 17th during open hours at Oak Woods from 10 am to 5 pm.

Whitney Johnson is an artist working in sound and music, considering the strange ways our bodies and minds understand what we hear. She composes, performs, and installs multi-channel sound with viola, sine tones, Ace Tone organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording. Her latest albums, Hav and Stena (2024, Drag City) embody alter egos to join the cult of Hermaphroditus in Cypriot and Greek antiquity. In tandem with her practice, she is Assistant Professor of Art and Technology/Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who use string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more. Their influences are vast — dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a Midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy.