Visual Audio Abstraction
Visual Audio Abstraction
By: Nancy R. Rouse
Born in 1977, the offspring of a Vietnam War veteran who had been repeatedly poisoned over the course of his service by Agent Orange. Though his country finally came to their senses decades later acknowledging the first victims were affected by the terrible herbicides, little was known as to how far the reach of altered environmental genetics. I am the product of such an unwilling thing. Raised as if everything was normal, many times growing up in school getting reprimanded for not grasping the concept of the verbal instructions. When I was caught staring out the windows of my class room instead of paying attention to the abstraction that fell upon me, I was made to stay in detention for recess to write over and over again, "I will not stare out the window during class." Unaware myself that the world around me had a very different perception than what I had been cursed with. I was born with a severe hearing impairment due to my father"s fate of being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Only perceiving sixty percent of sound in my left ear. My right ear, completely deaf. You see, staring out the window made more sense as a child, the way the wind blew leaves across the sidewalk or how the occasional bird danced in the wind. That was my comfort the music I could see in the realm of static and Visual Audio Abstraction as the background was swept away by inaudible sounds the subject was pushed to the front dancing in an array of abstract composition and colour. Early on I began to vaguely communicate through my artwork unable to truly connect with those around me. Helen Keller once said, "The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus-- the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir, and keeps us in the intellectual company of man."
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