Wednesday, June 28, 2006

in search of janet cardiff

I've been trying to figure out where installation and sound artist Janet Cardiff lives and works. For an internationally acclaimed artist, she doesn't seem to have a homepage. Get online woman! I'm trying to find out where the artists/professionals I most admire work/teach (hopefully) so I can apprentice myself to them somehow (assuming I'm worthy). Or at least hear them lecture.

After extensive googling I found a bio stating that Cardiff lives Lethbridge, Alberta of all places! What the crap? She appears on the University of Lethbridge's Dept of Art roster as an Adjunct Professor, but I know what that means: York has had Michael Ondaatje listed as an adjunct for the Glendon campus for years....
A visit to her representing gallery Luhring Augustin NYC tells me she and her partner George Bures Miller currently live and work in Berlin. Of course they do.
And to think I believed for even an instant I'd find Cardiff so ridiculously within reach, in Alberta.....

Cardiff is a sound artist that activates entire galleries and neighborhoods for the audience. I have experienced her pieces Whispering Room, The Paradise Institute (pictured below), and her murder-mystery audio walk presented at the Musee d'art contemporain in Montreal last summer. I've never before encountered an artist who so completely grasps the relation of sound to environment and memory. I'll let Atom explain.....



Atom Egoyan's article on Cardiff

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Monday, June 12, 2006

fred


i've acclimatized to changing time zones one week at a time. i'm now at the homestead, looking forward to reading my stack of books on the deck, sorting through beach glass with simon, and generally hoping the rain will stop.

i'm so disappointed to find that fredericton keeps expanding southward. UNB has leased off parcels of the woodlot, and we now have big boxes moving in, cluttering the drive to new maryland. i have seen the future, and it looks like edmonton.
you can drive for an hour in any direction without hitting a dense collection of trees (not a forest mind you, but a patch of trees). every neighborhood has its own mall: southgate, northgate, bonniedoon, kingsway, west ed mall of course, and south edmonthon common. each mall has all the same stores..... it's a gross nightmare, a city of malls with no gathering area and a ghost downtown that is empty of life by 6pm every night (except when the oilers win, then people get in their cars and drive all over the downtown waving at each other--but they don't get out).

oh fredericton. i'll be doing all my shopping downtown, at the Victory. and i can walk there.

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