Katherine Trimble Touch box

When does a sound become music? When does language break down into sound? What happens to live music if you can’t see the performer? Houston-based artist and musician, Katherine Trimble asks her audience to contemplate the breakdown of sounds in an immersive site-specific installation entitled Touch Box.

Katherine Trimble is a Houston-based musician and visual artist. She makes audiovisual installations and performances that explore how our senses influence, contradict and depend on each other to create our own individual versions of the world. Originally from Rochester, NY, she earned a BFA in Animation from the Rhode Island School of Design (2006) and an MFA in Art & Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2012), and has performed and exhibited her work internationally in a wide range of art spaces, film festivals, music venues and public spaces. She currently teaches at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA) and Houston Community College.

Dr. Melissa Warak is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at El Paso and specializes in the relationship of music and sound to art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Dr. Warak is a Houston native and earned a B.A. in English literature and art history from Vanderbilt University, and her M.A. / Ph.D. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. Her current research focuses on the ways that visual artists from the mid-fifties to late sixties employed musical models in their work. Aside from musical and sound art, her research interests include the history of abstraction, spirituality in modern and contemporary art, science and technology in modern and contemporary art, and astronomy in art. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the Getty Research Institute, the Royal Music Association of the United Kingdom, The Menil Collection in Houston, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Kress Foundation, and the Yale University Art Galleries, among others.