Cave Paintings

2003

 

A silent five-part opera about pigs and humans, blood and rust, this installation utilizes vision to impart noise, and tactile materiality to generate a silent articulation. It consists of four walls of sound waves drawn at an exaggerated scale, spanning the entire gallery space. In the ‘reading’ of the sound waves, the viewer simultaneously sees and hears the narrative. Expressed through the voices of nine characters, based on human and animal (pig) ‘speech’ patterns, and human-made sounds (musical/mechanical), a narrative unfolds that utilizes the metaphor of the cave as a means to address conditions of living in the present. The image is composed of lines, delineated by charcoal or routered out and filled with pigments made from pig blood and rust. The transformation from one to the other of these two symbolic substances reference life, death, decay, transformation, regeneration.

 

 


 

 


 

media: pig blood, rust, graphite, charcoal, paint

dimensions: installation 830 sq. ft.

 

Cave Paintings was curated for a solo exhibition at WARC Gallery, Toronto. Supported by The Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council.