Mounted is excited to announce our third collaborative arts project for visual artists and writers. The project is based around the idea of dissonance and involves artists responding to poems on the theme.
An exhibition of the art and poetry will be on show at Mounted in February 2022. Keep an eye out on the website and socials for more details.
In strict terms, the word dissonance is usually referred to in a musical context, as a lack of harmony among musical notes. However, for the purposes of this project, we widen out the idea, allowing the concept to be contextualized into a much broader canvas of possibilities.
Dissonance is often experienced when we detect that something is not as we think it should be. A lack of harmony or agreement between things. Modernist painter Vasily Kandinsky reveled in this feeling, seeing it as a creative force.
‘Clashing discords, loss of equilibrium, ‘principles’ overthrown, unexpected drumbeats, great questionings, apparently purposeless strivings, stress and longing […] This is our harmony.’—Vasily Kandinsky1
Dissonance, in whatever form can have an unsettling affect upon us—disrupting our desire for the peaceful integration of our life experiences with our cognitive belief systems. Social psychology researcher Leon Festinger pioneered the area of Cognitive Dissonance in his 1957 book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. The theory says that humans strive for internal psychological consistency—we want our beliefs to accord with our actions. When we sense there is dissonance, we strive to resolve it and reduce the attendant feeling of discomfort, often by ignoring conflicting information or trying to justify our behavior.
Mounted’s Vicki Benn has written a blog on the theme of Dissonance. It is well worth a read. You can find it here.