Taking her art to new heights
Growing up in City Heights in the 1980s and ’90s introduced Margaret Noble to the world of movement and sound through music like hip-hop and electronic dance music. Kids were beat-boxing and break dancing, or going to raves and other underground parties in later years.
“I remember that, one time, we got a party map to go to a trolley station, then got in a taxi to the South Bay harbor. We boarded water taxis from there to a three-story barge in Tijuana. DJS on every floor, dancing like you have never seen, and all surrounded by the ocean in the night,” she says. “This culmination of childhood experiences at the park and adult shenanigans at underground parties opened my eyes to technology and sound as critical artforms for my life.”
After some time as an electronic music DJ in Chicago’s underground club scene, she branched into experimental artwork with a master’s degree in fine arts from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago — creating pieces that include sound, sculpture and performance.
Her work has been commissioned and exhibited nationally and internationally, and she’s currently presenting her “[Sky][muse]” collection as the resident artist in the San Diego International Airport’s Fall 2020 Performing Arts Residency Program. Through December 2020, her collection of audio-visual works will be available on personal electronic devices as part of reframing the airport experience and elevating travelers’ experiences with color, light and sound.
Noble, 47, lives in North Park with her husband, Adrian Huth, and her cats Leeloo and Cheetoh. She’s a freelance artist and educator working with multimedia design, computer programming and public presentation, and the work of her students at High Tech High’s Media Arts campus has been presented at the San Diego Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the San Diego Museum of Art. She took some time to talk about her residency work with the airport, how the COVID-19 pandemic and protests against police brutality have influenced her work, and the time she performed in a Super Bowl pregame show.
Q: Why did you want to participate in this performing arts residency program with the San Diego International Airport? What was it about this program that appealed to you?
A: The airport is a fascinating place. It holds dreams of exploration, opportunities in other regions and connections between separated loved ones. It is a place of excitement, joy and sometimes fear. It is a place where you have to be perfectly patient and flexible as you enter the terminal and await the journey. There are people from everywhere waiting in an ambiguous time and place. It is a space in between spaces and to me the perfect place to engage audiences.
Q: Where did your interest in experimental art — of sound, sculpture and performance art — come from?
A: I love the opportunity to be free within multiple media. My training is in sound, and audio lends itself to so many different visual and performative art forms. I started out working as a house music DJ, and this was truly a nightly, experimental challenge. I was tasked with figuring out which records to mix together and which sounds would influence a dance floor to move. My current practice is an extension of this collage-based medium, but now I combine multimedia elements that reach audiences beyond the dance floor. Maybe not necessarily charging them to physically get up and move — although that still happens sometimes — but also provoking audiences with new ideas or ways of seeing.
Q: What is it about this art form that you find yourself drawn to?
A: These experiments are a thrilling challenge and often risky. Not everything works all the time, and very rarely does an artwork I make reach or connect with everyone. I suppose that is because there is no universal art and that is precisely what is engaging for me. I have to ask myself questions. What am I trying to achieve? Is this even possible? Who will it reach? Can I get behind the work and feel proud of it? Will it give audiences something to hold onto or think about later?
Q: Your artwork is influenced by the Southern California dance culture of the 1980s and ’90s? Can you share some examples of how that dance culture environment has shown up in your artwork?
A: I think the idea of connecting with audiences through sound and technological media is prevalent in all of my artworks. For example, with my [Sky] [muse] project for the San Diego International Airport’s Performing Arts Residency Program, I am literally designing escapes into visuals and sound for audiences to engage with on their own electronic devices. In the majority of my sound sculptures, audiences are invited to physically engage with sculptures in order to activate the sounds embedded within them. For my installation that was at Wonderspaces in 2019, audiences wore cordless headphones and blindfolds to engage with the world sensorially through a rope maze. In all cases, there is an element of movement and exploration, which is what I felt from dance culture in the 1980s and 1990s.
Q: Your “[Sky] [muse]” experience for August 2020 was titled “Compass,” where the compass is what guides us, and you asked travelers where they’re headed and in what directions they’re going? I’d like to ask you the same: Where are you headed?
In what directions are you going?
A: My compass is anchored in my home literally and emotionally, but the pointer spins all around. Pointing to various self-explorations and project explorations with other artists. The pointer jumps around between each direction as I navigate my goals and passions in balance with my home life and educational work. Things are never fixed; I live from project to project.
Q: In a statement on your website, you say that “... I weave technological, philosophical and psychological themes into my work. I dig deep into perception, fear, power, and history (public and private).” I’m curious about how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced your work as an artist, and the philosophical and psychological themes you’re seeing. Can you talk about those themes, and how digging into things like perception, fear, and power in your work, have been colored by the ongoing pandemic?
A: I would say that I am not only impacted as a person and an artist by COVID-19, but the deep civil unrest we are having as a society as we re-examine the systemic racism and murderous violence against persons of color from institutions of power. These many elements brewing, along with the upcoming election and my personal stress of working in education, are all powerful influencers on my work and have been for several years. I have made projects about White supremacy, poverty, sexism and scientific dogma (to name a few). What is interesting for me now, in thinking about the visual and sonic apps that I am making for the airport, is that I have recently been actively working to give audiences an artistic diversion from the many worries of today.
Q: What has your work as an artist taught you about yourself?
A: I have been rejected by curators, denied by funders, and have had public failures with my artworks over the last 15-plus years. My work teaches me that I am resilient and that I really need to keep pursuing the arts for the rest of my life. No matter the agonies, the rewards make it all worthwhile.
Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
A: This idea has come from many people I know and I share it with my students worried about the future and interested in pursuing the arts: “People who are artists will always be artists. It doesn’t matter what distractions, career paths or disruptions emerge; an artist will always come back and find something to create.”
Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?
A: As a teenager, I danced in the 1988 Super Bowl (pregame show), which was hosted in San Diego.
Q: Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend.
A: My husband’s cooking, colorful sunsets, and new music to listen to.