A Performance by Victoria Shen
Inside Mark Flood’s exhibition Buddy Can You Spare a Meme
Presented in partnership with Fusebox Festival
Curated by JD DiFabbio
Get sliding scale tickets
Saturday, April 18th, doors at 8pm, performance at 9pm
5419 Glissman Road, Austin, TX 78702
Victoria Shen (A.K.A. Evicshen) is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco. Shen's practice is concerned with the materiality of sound and its relationship to the human body through a lens of disruption and experimentation. She creates and manipulates custom-built sculptures and extensions specific to her body to challenge conventional methods of sound production and erode the boundaries between performer, tool, and audience.
Shen will perform in dialogue with a new exhibition by Houston-based artist Mark Flood, “Buddy Can You Spare a Meme” inside Co-Lab's Culvert Gallery. Together, Flood and Shen operate on the same adversarial frequency. Both artists weaponize humor and chaos against established systems—he through visual mockery, she through sonic assault. Where Flood asks you to laugh at the art world's absurdities, Shen makes you feel the discomfort of sound pushed past its breaking point. Neither artist offers you comfort or easy answers. They offer you a mirror, amplified and distorted, reflecting back the ridiculous machinery of contemporary culture at volumes impossible to ignore.
Shen uses what she calls "chaotic sound" to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning. Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, her work resists passive consumption. Instead, the body as both subject and instrument, using movement and tactility to provoke visceral, often confrontational encounters with sound. Her performances are deliberately physical, unpredictable, and ephemeral—rejecting polish in favor of raw immediacy.
In her live performances, she proposes an exploration between meaning and non-meaning through the physical activation of noise tropes. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. For recent performances, she pioneered the use of Needle Nails, acrylic nails with embedded turntable styluses, which allow her to play up to five tracks of a record at once. Needle Nails, Levitating speaker, and her Noise Combs are some of the objects created by her as part of an extensive repertoire of innovations in the design of sound augmentation. These sculptural elements invite the viewer to unpack one’s relationship with the material possibilities for creating sound. The appendage-like instruments and objects she makes, exemplify Shen’s ability to embody through sound her interest in the tension created by opposition: control and chaos, the unique and the mass produced, the practical and the absurd.
Shen has performed solo across North America, Japan, China, Mexico, Australia/NZ, the UK, and Europe, as a member of the turntable trio with Mariam Rezaei and Maria Chavez, as a member of hip hop group 1 Above Minus Underground. Shen has also collaborated with Mix Master Mike of the Beastie Boys and groups such as the Kronos Quartet, Matmos, clipping, Acid Mothers Temple, and Mike Watt and the Missing Men. Some notable venues in which she has performed include Boston City Hall, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, ISSUE Project Room NY, DOMMUNE Tokyo, Petreon Sculpture Park Cyprus, MUNCH Museum Oslo, Art Gallery of NSW Sydney, and Museo d'Arte Orientale Turin. Shen has also been an artist in residence at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm SE, WORM Rotterdam NL, Kurimanzutto New York US, The Royal Danish Academy Copenhagen DK, and AUDIUM San Francisco US, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Omaha US, and Headlands Center for the Arts US, and Audio Foundation Auckland NZ.
Shen currently works at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics Stanford and School of Visual Arts NY. Shen is also a serving member of the Board of Directors for The Lab in San Francisco.
