ANIMAL [a listening gym] transforms the gallery into a sensory-intensive environment that renders the body a conduit for sound. Conceived by artist and composer Ash Fure (2025 Creative Capital Awardee) in collaboration with architect Xavi L. Aguirre (stock-a-studio), the installation riffs on the spatial and behavioral logics of gyms, reimagining athletic equipment as a series of sonic sculptures activated through friction, pressure, and movement.

Over the past decade, Fure has developed a practice that foregrounds the physical force of sound, creating visceral installation-performances that challenge conventional notions of music. In ANIMAL [a listening gym], amplified frequencies and spatialized audio circulate through steel-clad structures that invite viewers to press, lean, lift, loiter, and observe. Shifting fields of light move in sync with the sound—from total saturation to near darkness, from seismic bass to the edge of silence—exercising perception to its limits. These moves activate a body-borne form of listening, one that situates sound not as a passive backdrop, but as a dynamic experience that unfolds through the body itself.

At the core of the project is an interest in forms of collective experience organized through shared sensation rather than speech. “The gym and the club are two of the only cultural containers I know that invite a kind of private/public, alone/together intensity,” Fure notes. “No pressure to perform the self through words; just the body and its edges, the energy and its limits, each on their own adrenaline ride.”

First commissioned by the Yale Schwarzman Center in 2023, ANIMAL [a listening gym] is part of an ongoing, shifting project that includes performances, an album recording, and future site-specific installations, including an upcoming expansion presented by The Industry in Los Angeles in late 2026. To adapt across these contexts, Aguirre designs the built environment as a change-ready system, a scalable kit-of-parts construction intended for movement, disassembly, and reconfiguration. “I treated the architecture itself as a form of portable equipment in service of the body, ready to adapt to new contexts without losing material value or social intensity,” he writes. Across its many forms, ANIMAL asks how sound can ignite the body’s capacity to sense, endure, and connect.