a flit of time, a flicker of place
… trees have roots, but people have
mobile imaginations and bodies,
mutable interfaces for navigating the world.
(Roland Jean)
Our sense of belonging – identity, culture, family and place - is fracture(d). Displacement and change cause and/or allow us to reposition ourselves and to construct new identities. We re-set, re-imagine or re-fresh ourselves in new guises and with consequences that are both positive and negative. Shifts offer insight and new perspectives into the world and greater agency for the ‘autonomous’ subject to alter and define her position in a dystopian world.
Most of us live in places other than our birthplaces. Our everyday lives are (dis)played in a context of political and economic uncertainty, homogenizing corporate culture, environmental destruction and conflicting values and ideologies. Domestic events, intimacies, mediated experiences and non-places mingle. Somewhere in-between, the artistic project occurs. In this place/time/situation, we engage with ideas and each other through creative proposition.
The metaphor of the socio-political system, the body and the senses fuses the sensual with the intellectual as an inquiry. Multi-track audio and distinct nodes of spatialized sound disrupt a stable and predictable social space. Polyphony suggests multiplicity (of voice), the cacophony of the everyday experience and the hysteria of capitalism. Deconstructed language and spatialized sound displace the mediated and fragmented experience of the banal and memorable.
The “singular” proposes a poetics of time and place within the social body using structure/ chance, social relations, high/low aesthetics and old/new technology. My approach to language has progressed (or, perhaps regressed) from sentence fragments and phrases, to words and syllables, and to phonemes, the granular units of spoken language as fundamental building blocks of language. Phonemes, used as sound events for polyphonic composition, reconfigure language in a ludic sense. Letters, words, and the multiplicity of combinations unveil potential and imaginary connections and meanings. (Did you really hear or just imagine /f-u-k/ or /z-i-g-u-r-a-t/ in that aleatory riff?)
Sound is a physical vibration. Sound is embodying. Sound impacts the body as direct, sensate experience. We hear audible sound; we are unaware of, yet affected by, inaudible sound. We listen, hear, speak, write and read. The spoken language integrates breath and the physical body with the mind, cognition and perception. It connects one body to (an)other bodies, suggesting (the beginning of) the collective. Voice endorses inner and outward thought of the individual members of the social body allowing for dialogue and difference, debate and dissent. Interpretation cannot be imposed. It is for the collective knowledge to discover.
BIOGRAPHY
From Toronto and based in Saskatoon, I have lived and worked throughout Canada. My roots are shallow but extensive.