Summer Sonar

This two channel site-specific sound installation was part of an exhibition in Spring 2017 at Druid Hill Park Pool No. 2 called Everyday Utopias, and was curated by Sheena Morrison. From the curatorial statement:

Artworks on display invite viewers to consider the promise of both real and imagined aspects of civic participation as they navigate their way through physical structures and spiritual spaces of the pool’s remains. Pool No.2 was a local flashpoint for the discourse on race that was happening nationally in American society during the mid-1950s and is a physical reminder that the failures and struggles of our efforts at civic repair are just as important as the successes. 

Summer Sonar consisted of the sound of running water, played out from two cone-style PA speakers temporarily installed under the eaves of the historic changing room building. Periodically, another sound rises up, that of the voices of children, as if heard from under the water. The work imagines the tragic death of the young African American boy whose drowning in the Patapsco River prompted the desegregation of the city pools, and the filling in of Pool No. 2. The sound is calming and joyous, but fraught by history, just as the site itself.