ellen moffat

Lebret, Saskatchewan

Lebret’s history includes Metis and Church communities, a residential school and farming activities. As a sculptural installation and site marker INHERITANCE fuses text, materials and symbolic forms. Names reflecting cultural groups, families, institutions and historic moments are carved into wood that references railway ties; small field stones provide the ground cover. Local historians and cultural groups participated in the research; students at the Whitecalf Residential School assisted with production as a collective effort. It was completed during a residency in the Qu’Appelle Valley.

Sherwood Park, Rosemont Art Gallery, Regina

Trace Elements integrates fact and fiction, native and settler communities, and past and present in a hybrid drawing/sculptural installation. The work is a graphic of overlapping habitation forms referencing cultures, time and place as a metaphor of time and history. The dwellings mimic the the actual dimensions of house structures. Installed at Rosemont Art Gallery, Regina concrete, sod, field stone.

Shades of Black and White used drawings by children 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. 

The Phoneme Project is an extended investigation into polyphonic composition using phonemes as note events and multi-channel spatialized sound in installation and performance. Phonemes (the granular units of spoken language) are extracted from professional recordings of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The series includes sound installation, interactivity and performance.

My process uses an iterative approach, focusing on composition generation, structure, physical interfaces, technology and/or interaction. The compositions suggest language as it is becoming or deteriorating, teasing with meaning, sense and sensibility. My references include sound, visual, linguistic, psychological and cartographic disciplines: aerial photography, cognitive (dys)functionality, linguistic gestalt and musical instruments.

vBox (2008)

BLOW combines fragmented vocal recordings, projection and audio equipment. Two voices – one male, one female – are deconstructed into semantic and grammatical units in a polyphonic composition that is output to twelve tracks  as spatialized sound. Breath, utterance, syllables and phrases propose a cut-up sound poem of sentience and rationality using high/low technology and aesthetics. The text explores sense and sensuality of the individual, the collective and utopic social movements. A cartographic-text map fusing concrete poetry and the nervous system of the human body as a techno-organic graphic is projected on one wall. Catalogue with Audio CD; essay by Betsy Warland. Collection of the Saskatchewan Arts Board.

<LISTEN>  BLOW  1’00