Center for Cavernous Listening

“a croak/makes a sign/makes a wail/makes a note”
– Dr. Clara M. Young-Kunstmann,
excerpt from field journal, 10:04pm, Sept. 2019

The Center for Cavernous Listening invites audiences into an immersive environment where sound and image collide. Blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction and performance and education, artist Martha Schnee creates constellations that exist in multiple dimensions at once, and uses humor to question how knowledge is produced and who gets to claim authority in the act of storytelling.

The work explores transmissions from the speculative Fermata Frog, an amphibian notable for its ability to respond to humans, interfere with radio frequencies, and metabolize environmental toxins. Viewers are greeted with a welcome video from the “Satellite Research Center” that explores the Fermata Frog through the lens of research and discovery.  

Also interwoven throughout the installation are fragments of text and drawings containing notes from performances, musical rehearsals, and dreams. Drawings made on-site are layered under and over photocopies of objects in the room, clay sound resonators, and silkscreen prints created from rubbings in Berlin, Germany, and Red Hook, New York. A second video work, deeper inside the gallery and projected onto chalk, speaks truth to propaganda Schnee has experienced in her own religious education. The result is an active, multidimensional system that challenges fixed forms of order and place and engages with doikayt, a Yiddish term for home in diaspora outside of nation-states. Viewers are invited to tune not only to what is present, but also to what is just beyond our perception. Walls hum, drawings shake, marks come together and fall away, and harmonies float through the ceiling. Where are the walls? Is this the ground? What happened here? What is outside of that window? Did you hear that?

Evoking both scientific study and spiritual practice, Center for Cavernous Listening becomes a site of ongoing meditation on how we listen, how we learn, how speculative realities can turn into action, and how we can embody other dimensions as the world keeps ending.

Martha Schnee is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily across silkscreen printmaking, performance, drawing, and sound. She performs with her band/art collective sidebody and co-directs sidebody press. Her work explores sonic landscapes, traces and indexes of memory, speculative creatures, education systems, and the breakdown of language. She is drawn to moments where surfaces tune and speak, where erasure creates new lines, where the speculative becomes a form of truth, and performance becomes a method of inquiry/repair.

Her work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Boston Art Review, The Portland Press Herald, as well as with the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.  She has shown work at museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including The Parrish Art Museum (NY), Distillery Gallery (MA), Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin), Aviatrix Gallery (Berlin), Field Projects (NY), Gallery 263 (MA), and more. With sidebody, she has performed at DIY venues across New England, as well as at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Paradise Rock Club, and the 2025 Boston Calling Music Festival.

She received her honors B.A. in American Cultural Studies from Bates College, her Ed.M in Arts in Education from Harvard University, and her MFA in Painting from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts. Currently, she is a Visiting Lecturer in the Studio Foundation and Art Education Departments at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She lives and works in Somerville, MA with her cat Moses and a Passion Flower plant clone that has been in her family since the 1990s.