Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night

My Voice Acts Like ROYGBIV, along with the works beside it, is part of Kim’s Terp Voices series, a group of drawings featuring alternative uses of musical notation to describe the various ways she is voiced by American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters, or “terps,” as they are often called in Deaf slang. In this work, Kim gestures at the shape of a rainbow to highlight how her voice shifts with the different personalities of each interpreter to become a “blue voice for fancy talks, a purple voice for social settings, an orange voice for conferences, a red voice for therapy sessions and so on.” The artist playfully but critically considers the labor of communication—her voice is constantly in negotiation with and being mediated by others.