Damping Chamber

1999
Audio installation
Media: 1/2” felt, water, 6 speakers, multitracker, enamel, buckets; (chamber structure) studs, 2×4, drywall, paint
Dimensions: 5’ x 8’ x 6’ (chamber interior), sizes 7 & 9 (swimsuits)
Duration: 04:40 loop

In Damping Chamber, the structural capacity of felt in terms of its potent absorption and saturation characteristics is approached metaphorically through the vibration of sound and water, both being elements that are readily absorbed. The soundtrack is heard only when inside a small, dark, dampered chamber, its walls, ceiling and floor completely insulated with thick felt. The illusion of being submerged is further conjured through the sounds of deep water and two synchronized swimmers practicing a difficult routine, moving and singing vertically through the chamber while in dialogue with each other across horizontal space. A fine tension is set in motion between breathing, trust, and trauma. Outside the chamber, where it is quiet, a pair of swimsuits presumably worn by the swimmers are made of the same heavy, dark blue wool felt that lines the interior of the chamber. In the absence of bodies, the disturbingly weighty soaked suits drip dark blue water into catch buckets below. Damping Chamber stems from our ongoing inquiry into the collaborative process and the complex negotiations made in pursuit of synchronicity.

call

2001
Audio installation
Media: power amp speaker, video camera, computer, fabric, lights
Dimensions: 1000 sq.ft.
Duration: 01:25 loop

In this audio installation, tension is built between seeing and hearing. The sound is based on a call/song/chant sung in Arabic. The distant vocalization beckons the visitor toward the sound source. Motion sensors trigger a graduated volume decrease as the visitor approaches, however, so that the voice seems to recede rather than become more audible. Expectations for intimacy, resolution and full audio delivery are thwarted and the voice stays just out of reach. The psychological effect is one of frustration and discombobulation, but one is also left with the desire to follow the call, to grasp its source and meaning. It is often in the frustration of our efforts that those efforts are doubled and our attention is arrested.

Watcher

2007
Video installation
Media: 4 houses, 10 projectors & DVD players, rear-projection screens
Dimensions: 2 city blocks
Duration: 5-10 min. loops

Watcher is a multi-building video installation. Viewed on the windows of a series of houses, some of which I inhabited during childhood, images from my memories of growing up on D’Arcy Street in Toronto merge with imagined stories that have occurred behind the buildings’ facades over the course of the area’s complex history; fact is peppered with fiction. The work is tinged with sadness as it deals with personal loss and the melancholy of inevitable change in any place. Continuity within change is conveyed through the quotidian, everyday gestures and activities of the characters, forming a link to the distant past and to the future.

As viewers walk from house to house, they become implicated as voyeurs in the human compulsion to not mind our own business. In turn the shadowy inhabitants of the houses recurrently pause during their quotidian activities to watch over the street.

Extreme Centre

2007
Audio installation
Media: 32 speakers, 2 pro amplifiers, 16 cd players, fabric covered built walls
Dimensions: 77 sq. m

Extreme Centre is an audio installation in the form of a maze. As visitors negotiate the twisting passages, they hear a cacophony of whispering, issued from speakers set into the passage walls. The sound of whispering ushers visitors along the passages but also engenders a range of reactions from unease, insecurity and paranoia to intimacy and the conspiratorial. Concentrating on individual speakers, the listener can then decipher text, sourced from a range of authors across vast geographies, epochs and political positions. The common denominator of all the text is the arguable categorization of “extreme.”

“Extreme” is a term that is defined as being unreasonable, abnormal or unacceptable, far out from the centre of a civil society, even incendiary. However, the term is almost always applied by others rather than by a group labeling itself. Authors whose words are labeled “extreme” position themselves in a self-defined centre.

The use of the oxymoron “extreme centre” is intended to focus on this contradiction. The words of individuals as disparate as Idi Amin Dada, Steven Biko, Catherine the Great, Dayglo Abortions, Marquis de Sade, David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, Herman Hesse, Mahatma Gandhi, Heinrich Himmler, Abbie Hoffman, Ho Chi Minh, Marin Luther King Jr., Genghis Khan, Nikita Khrushchev, Charles Manson, F.T. Marinetti, Golda Meir, Augusto Pinochet, Plato, Pol Pot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sex Pistols, Bob Dylan, Gloira Steinem, Valerie Solanas, Leon Trotsky, François Truffaut, Oscar Wilde and Emiliano Zapata are juxtaposed with one another in the shifting, morphing, clashing and merging of political and philosophical convictions. The only stability of the centre is its constant state of flux.

The Seven Scents

2003
Performative action
Media: costumes, 7 deck chairs, 7 atomizers (scent contents various), scent strips, 7 CD players with headphones
Dimensions: 20’x4’x3’
Soundtrack duration: 1-5 min. loops

The Seven Scents is a sound-scent journey that uses, as a point of departure, the legendary exoticism and adventure of the Seven Seas. The Seven Scents provides an occasion for virtual travel. Targeting the high volume tourist population of the performance locale, this work presents options for traveling through a sampling station of matched smells and sounds associated with travel. Each set of smell/scent is named after one of the Seven Seas (e.g. Scent No. 2 North Atlantic is paired with the sounds of an airport terminal). Cruise ship deck chair recliners face the waters of Lake Ontario and invite passersby to lie back, relax, listen to a series of soundscapes and inhale the ambiance of travel via freshly sprayed scent strips. Like spa therapists, the artists gently facilitate each lounger’s sensorial reverie.

Transportation and memory are two key means of escape in the effort to get away. Transportation is conjured and memory is triggered via a series of white noise sounds recorded at seven targeted sites related to travel, in-between states of transitional spaces i.e. bus stations, airports, etc. These places in which travelers are often stuck offer, ironically, a space for reverie and contemplation where the process of getting there is often more enlightening than actually arriving. The series of scents is based on the desire for escape in combination with the inescapable everyday. Using a base of a mass-produced perfume, a perfume that promises ‘an ocean breeze passing over floral and exotic notes’, seven related eau de toilette scents were concocted. They employ a base note of salty sea and incorporate post-industrial smells within the top, bottom and middle notes. Distilling sound and scent, romance and reality, the piece contemplates the fantasies of escape and the odious actualities of tourism.

The Seven Sauces

2003
Performative action
Media: costumes, trolley, 7 thermos (scent contents various), 7 CD players with headphones
Dimensions: 2.5’ x 3’ x 1.5’
Soundtrack duration: 1-5 min. loops

The Seven Sauces is the initial incarnation of The Seven Scents, a sound-scent journey that uses, as a point of departure, the legendary exoticism and adventure of the Seven Seas. As with The Seven Scents, The Seven Sauces provides an occasion for virtual travel. Targeting the high volume tourist population of Granville Island in Vancouver, this work presents options for traveling through a sampling station of matched smells and sounds associated with travel. Each set of smell/scent is named after one of the Seven Seas (e.g. Scent No. 2 North Atlantic is paired with the sounds of an airport terminal). Like spa therapists, the artists gently facilitate each participant’s sensorial reverie.

Transportation and memory are two key means of escape in the effort to get away. Transportation is conjured and memory is triggered via a series of white noise sounds recorded at seven targeted sites related to travel, in-between states of transitional spaces i.e. bus stations, airports, etc. These places in which travelers are often stuck offer, ironically, a space for reverie and contemplation where the process of getting there is often more enlightening than actually arriving. The series of scents is based on the desire for escape in combination with the inescapable everyday. Distilling sound and scent, romance and reality, the piece contemplates the fantasies of escape and the odious actualities of tourism.

Rest

2001
Audio installation
Media: plywood, 2×4, drywall, paint, foam insulation, fleece fabric, carpet, plexiglass, 40 speakers, 6 amplifiers, E-MU sampler
Dimensions: 900 sq.ft., ht.:10’

Rest incorporates the gallery space as articulator of sound. Negotiations between acoustics, architecture and membranes are played out via the constructed configuration of the physical structure and the orchestrated voice. The music composition is informed by chants used in Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist practices and by Indian and Arabic vocal traditions. This amalgamation continues my ongoing research into cross-cultural fertilizations. The vocalization is used here to generate a perceptual trance, a vehicle that expresses the movement of the body in space, and the synchronous awareness and release of self. As the visitor moves through the 8 sets of 5-speaker sound arcs, a spiraling tunnel of sound is created.

Demon Girl Duet

2008
Video-audio
Media: video projection, stereo audio track
Dimensions: variable
Duration: 07:46 loop

Demon Girl Duet presents a sonic-video duet in the form of a single-channel video projection,
juxtaposing and interweaving two separate but simultaneous journeys on rivers of mythic
proportions. One journey leads us toward the sea down the Chang Jiang (Yangtze), China’s
principle waterway, and the other takes us inland up the Niagara, which spans a 35-mile stretch
of the border between Canada and the United States. Each journey is led by the same ‘tour
guide’ in the form of an elusive, phantasmagorical swimmer who sings haunting siren songs of
warning about the ecological and social consequences of controlling nature and human
populations by imposing rational order and insatiable development.

PED

2006
Performative action
Media: 3 custom audio bicycle systems, various media
Dimensions: each unit W:4’ L:12’ H:6’

PED is a collective that makes participatory art projects that operate in public space. Each project is created specifically for the varying location and situation, and is simultaneously a pseudo service bureau and an info/excer-tainment outlet from which visitors/participants may embark on free, talking-bicycle ‘lecture’ tours. In some PED projects, each bicycle is outfitted with a pedal-activated audio system (i.e. as the participant pedals, they hear the lecture, and when they stop the lecture ceases), while in others, the audio is transmitted via electronic communications devices such as walkie-talkies. The series expands the parameters of performance by both invisibly performing a service bureau and orchestrating viewers to unwittingly perform as they conspicuously ride through the city on the talking-bicycles, disseminating information by broadcasting the lectures.

Each site-specific instance of PED provides a different menu of thematic tours, each with specific routes to follow. The content of each of the PED lecture tours is cultivated through intense research on the local. histories, and is based on a recontextualization of the varying cities’ projected images contrasted with their quotidian activities. Much of the marketing of a city depends on creating a pre-digested, unified image and reifying stereotypes. Conversely, the projects explore the diverse subjective vantages within the living city through an analysis of what should be seen/hidden, experienced/forbidden, known/forgotten, celebrated/mourned.

Although the first bicycles were intended for the amusement of the upper classes, they have come in the last century to represent populist and non-conformist aims. The PED bicycles occupy utopian territory as a viable form of public communication and democratic address.

PED projects have taken place in the U.S.A., Northern Ireland, Canada, China and Brazil. Previous PED projects include PED.Buffalo (2001), PED.Belfast (2002), PED.Tonawandas (2003), PED.Hamilton (2003), PED.Chongqing (2006), PED.Rio (2007), PED.St John’s (2008), PED.Toronto (2016).

PED.Chongqing presented collective teams riding custom audio bicycle systems (built from locally salvaged bicycle parts) that pulled carts and powered hacked megaphones. These human-driven six-wheeled public address vehicles broadcast pedal-activated audio on a large scale via karaoke-inspired lectures, spreading critical information and loaded entertainment in a new/ancient society. The three tours included:
1. The Long, Long Virtuous Path to Sunshine Vehicle
2. The Twin Stacks of Supreme Happiness Vehicle
3. The Vehicle for Ten Thousand Fertile Scholars’ Star Rated Market Approved Big Shiny Hot Pot for the Benevolent Ghosts from the Immortal Mountains of the Healthy Valley of Plenty.

PED.Chongqing was completed by an expanded team that included 38 students of the Sichuan
Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China.

Tour

2014
Audio-video installation
Media: Blu-ray video projection, double stereo audio
Dimensions: variable
Duration: 09:27 loop

The audio-video Tour embarks on a global journey contemplating arguably ‘healed’ sites of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century genocidal massacres.

Murambi, Rwanda (April 16–22, 1994)
Choeung Ek, Cambodia (April 17, 1975–January 7, 1979)
Treblinka, Poland (July 23, 1942–October 19, 1943)
Wounded Knee, United States (December 29, 1890)

Events that occurred over the last century retain heat: some victims and perpetrators are still alive; justice, truth and reconciliation processes continue. Yet when we look, what do we not see? Human atrocities are easily absorbed, literally, back into the land. But the brutal facts remain. It is only through the persistent retelling of past events that we can keep these histories alive and sustain the memory of what has become invisible, even as acts of atrocity continue to be perpetrated in the present.

Grappling with how such horrific histories can possibly be represented, and how to maintain the critical specificity of the local within a narrative about the global, Tour engages intimately with each place. As the viewer traverses the land, what initially appear as harmless, even banal, details of local flora take on a much more haunting and menacing presence as the sorrowful vocalization unfolds and the location is revealed. The audio component simultaneously collaborates with and challenges the visual to both lull and jar the listener/viewer. Based on traditional lullabies*, the songs are hummed and chanted without lyrics. These are lullabies that may have been sung and heard over generations by the victims of these genocides. In some of the contexts, these were also crooned by the perpetrators.

*Traditional Music Sources
Cyusa (Rwandan)
Lakota Lullaby
Bom Pe (Khmer)
Zolst Azoy Lebn (Yiddish)

LamentGeography-excerpt