Thessia Machado is a visual/sound artist, instrument builder and performer whose work plumbs the materiality of sound and its effect on our shifting perceptions of space. She creates circumstances in which to mine the matter of her pieces for their innate physical properties and the sonic and visual relationships that can arise from their interactions. In improvised and composed performed works, the ensemble of things is augmented by a dynamically responsive and intentionally unpredictable human element. Electronics are often implicated.
Machado’s sculptures, sound installations and drawings have been widely exhibited in the US and Europe, most recently in the exhibition TIME SPACE EXISTENCE, part of the Venice Architecture Biennial; the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz; Sounds Now Festival in Athens, the exhibition MediaLive: Technology as Healing at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and the solo exhibition Toward the Unsound at the Arts Club of Chicago.
She has performed collaborative experimental music with handmade and modified instruments in both respectable institutions, such as the Drawing Center, The American Academy in Berlin, Issue Project Room, Harvestworks, as well as in dilapidated basements and experimental spaces throughout Brooklyn and beyond.
Machado has attended residencies at Arteles Creative Center, Finland, The MacDowell Colony, Homesession, Barcelona, Yaddo, Ipark, NARS Foundation, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the American Academy in Berlin, Experimental Television Center and the Bronx Museum. In the fall of 2019 and spring of 2021 Machado was a visiting faculty member at Bennington College, VT, and in the spring of 2020 she helped coax righteous/joyous sounds from the students in the Sound Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago while trying to survive the beginning of the pandemic.