CVAG Window + Plaza Media Gallery
LED IN REVIEW — Screening Series
In this screening series the Comox Valley Art Gallery presents four new-media artworks co-produced with established artists from across Canada.
Multimedia artists, Michael Fernandes (Halifax), Sarah Crawley (Winnipeg), Sonny Assu (Campbell River) and Ruby Singh (Vancouver), were commissioned to participate in a project that utilized the gallery’s recently acquired digital production and presentation equipment –
the large scale LED wall installed in the Window Media Gallery to face outward onto the plaza. The system also includes an eight channel exterior audio system.
Each of the artists have place-based practices that involve immersive relationships between humans and the natural environments in their regions. This project offered the artists an opportunity to expand their skills while conducting site specific research and producing new specific video + sound works for digital-technology presentations. The artists worked with the CVAG curatorial and technical team, and digital format production/post-production experts.
The outcome of the Digital Impact Grant project has been the creation of four distinct works:
November 23 – November 25, 2024 (In Review)
Michael Fernandes
WE DON’T KNOW – Video | Implied Drawings | Text
This installation is a compilation of old and new technologies that imply “a sense of improvisation and literalism, which results in an intimacy and directness and opposes the packaged, the streamlined and the simulated.”
November 26 – December 5, 2024 (In Review)
Sarah Crawley
As the Wind Blew – Video | Sound
Crawley’s video is part of a larger body of work that explores the experience of her mother’s passing that encompassed her mom’s increasing frailty, the artist’s role as her caretaker and executor, and her own grief as daughter. The beginning of the artist’s healing came with the exploration and making process, during which she came to “recognize the powerful space created by the intersection where water and land meet, a liminal place of instability, a space filled with potential.
“…In my practice I often create a structure or methodology in which to explore an idea, creating a set of rules that I either follow or break. This process frequently involves ritualistic behavior and functions within an understanding of ritual as mental and physical strategies that create access to knowledge, and emphasize the relationship between doing and meaning.”– SC
as the wind blew: the ground beneath me, at the water’s edge, in its path
December 7 – December 20, 2024 (In Review)
Sonny Assu
THE LAST OF US – Continuously Generating Animation
Collaborating Animator: Dan Beaule
Overfishing, resource extraction, and agricultural and industrial development have created a devastating reality for the Pacific Salmon. Inspired by an article about an environmentally impacted river and its accompanying photo of a lone, spawning Salmon inspired Assu to create this work. Sonny enlisted the support of emerging animator Dan Beaule to develop a persistently swimming salmon on a never-ending journey to spawn. Beaule’s continuously generating animation captures the perilous optimism of the solo swimmer.
December 21, 2024 – January 21, 2025 (Premieres December 21, 2024)
Ruby Singh
Polyphonic Garden – Shorelines (Working Title) — Video | Sound | Text
New Work Being Developed from Research at the Mcloughlin Gardens (Merville) Forest + Seaside
This work intimately explores the artist’s relationship with this living, breathing and animate world and the complexity of being in an immigrant body in a colonial state on stolen Indigenous lands. Using tools of bio-sonification, the song is raised from indigenous flora and fungi, transforming bio-electricity into midi data to inform pitch and rhythm. The emerging melodies are then mixed with field recordings and unique instrumentation. The keyboards are tempered with the songs of coastal beings of the sea and air to further deepen these sonic landscapes, the midi data of plants and fungi trigger the songs of their animal cohabitants: i.e. bull kelp triggers the song of orcas. A complexly layered sonic ecology of connection and wonder for the natural world emerges, where we might imagine how to move towards right relations with these generous lands, waters and skies.
“I hope create an invitational AV piece that moves us into the embrace of this place through binaural recordings of rolling waves, the bio-sonification of spruce pushing synth pads, and bull kelp bioelectricity playing keyboards filled with the song of Orca and strings. This buoyant and spacious composition will not rush, it will be created in sharp contrast to the attention deficit of our fast paced desires and will seek to summon us to relax into a lush soundscape and dream like movement of kelp in water to help remind us of the generosity of our gorgeous and interdependent world.” – RS
This screening series is presented as part of the 50 | 20 Retrospective at CVAG.
