Laura Ganci’s work with sound installation began when she was helping her father convert family VHS tapes to DVD, in an effort to preserve before inevitable decay. Having replayed these videos, she started to notice ways her father’s presence was evident in the things he decided to capture. She recognized that the medium echoed the sentiment in that just as stories lose their sharp edges over time, so too does the technology we entrust to encapsulate them. Her layered and immersive narrative sound and video installations center on themes of story-telling and memory, as well as the intersubjectivity of human relationships. Voices in space become single stories, and when mixed the abstraction of a single narrative causes visitors to turn inward and recount their own memories. Her viewer/listener must enlist some level of aural hierarchy which aligns with their own lived experience to pull words and meanings. This medium seemed the appropriate way to honor the memory of her father, whom she lost to Covid on March 21, 2020. Ironically, sound was her only means of communicating with him in his last days in the hospital. This piece, titled “I’m Still Here,” is meant to create a space for celebration of life and collective grief.

• The Hour of Lead