The original site-specific sound installation of Claybank Voices from the Mama Wetotan/Crossfirings project was modified for a gallery exhibition, incorporating industrial artifacts from the site with video projections. The video, by Ken Wilson, reworks Dick Bird’s 1940’s footage of workers and the process of brick production. See PUBLIC ART & SURVEYS for a full description of the project.
<LISTEN> ClaybankVoices 1′33
BLOW weaves together two voices - one male, one female - as fragments of semantic and grammatical speech in a polyphonic composition. Breath, utterance, syllables and phrases offer a cut-up audio poem of sentience and rationality using high/low technology and aesthetics in twelve tracks of spatialized sound. The text juxtaposes sense and sensuality of subjective, collective positions and utopic possibility. A cartographic text-map fusing concrete poetry with a schematic of the nervous system of the human body is projected on one wall as a techno-organic graphic. Catalogue with Audio CD; essay by Betsy Warland. Collection of the Saskatchewan Arts Board.
<LISTEN> BLOW 1′00
Fault Lines offers a personal yet anonymous impression of place using fleeting moments of still and moving image, text, light and sound. During a visit to the neighbourhood of my formative years in Toronto, I explored my beat as a mnemonic gesture of presence and absence, subjectivity and poetics using association and resonance. My agency suggests Proustian memory, the flaneuse and the faux scientist within a structure of intention and chance. The experiential installation proposes an environment of rhythm, repetition, silence and shadowy half-light. Catalogue with DVD (video) and audio CD. Collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery.
<LISTEN> Fault Lines 1′12
Travel blends experiences of the exotic and mundane, present and historic, and assumption and fact. I prefer to travel slow on local, ground transport systems with historic texts as companion material. During a 9-week trip to Turkey, I photographed every transit point en route (airport and ferry terminals; bus depots; street corners and roadsides) as an ironic tourist gesture of place-in-between-Place and place-before-Place. I digitized and output the images onto panels of acetate as a chronological photo-journal juxtaposed to panels with textual excerpts from the Odyssey as the Grand Narrative. A three-voice spoken word sound track combined personal narrative, history and interpretation using diaristic fragments, anecdotes and quotation. Artist booklet with audio CD. Saskatchewan Tour with SCAM.
Shades of Black and White used drawings to probe the question of our relationship with technology. Grade 3 students from diverse geographic regions, cultural groups and economic sectors in Saskatchewan made drawings of their daily extra-curricular activities. Reprocessed as slides, the images were incorporated into a multi-media installation with symbolic objects (school desks, sand, swing) and technologies (slide, filmstrip projectors, motorized swing) of the classroom, playground and childhood. The low-tech discursive environment of image, text, kinetic sculpture and sand offered a glimpse into their (and our) relationship with technology. Artist book/catalogue with essay by Vera Lemecha.
Canadian identity is a recurring national question. My response to this question started with a journey by train from Halifax to Vancouver during which I photographed the view from the train window every hour on the hour. The resulting documentary moments offer a set of “timeplaces” from coast to coast as an ironic portrait of place, or a portrait of an ironic place. Rather than the prairie grain elevator, the Rockies or the CN Tower, there is an abundance of nondescript landscapes, unidentifiable locales, and darkness. When time is equated with place, “Where is here?” is answered by the sound of the alarm. The work includes 103 digitized photos, output on mylar, and text that references the 24-hour travel schedule as a formal structure. Publication with essay by Robert Zingone. Multiple exhibitions across Canada.
