For me the noise of Time is not sad
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Presented by Dazibao
Technical assistance by PRIM.
November 10, 2011 - January 22, 2012
La Maison de la Culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce
Video, projection, sound
For me, the Photographer’s organ is not his eye (which terrifies me), but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates… I love these mechanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way, as if, in the Photograph, they were the very thing- and the only thing -to which my desire clings, their abrupt click breaking through the mortiferous layer of the Pose. For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches - and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
For me the noise of Time is not sad is an audio-visual installation incorporating multiple video projections and multi-channel sound. It takes Roland Barthes’ love of the mechanical sounds of the camera’s shutter mechanism and other time-keeping devices, as an extension, a link, to the moment and subject of the photograph, and a family story of a road trip taken by my father to retrieve my ailing grandfather, suffering from Alzheimer’s in St. Petersburg, Florida, when I was a child. The work considers time, duration, the sonic and the visual in temporal and spatial terms through a story fraught with loss and memory and its dissolution through aging, revealed through flashes, points in time, experienced non-sequentially through sound and light. For me the noise of Time is not sad inverts, to some degree, the temporal scale of photography and sound. Each channel of sound/video will be composed of hi-resolution audio recordings of camera shutters stretched over time, while the projected image flashes for the duration of the real-time shutter exposure. The images are of a familial travelogue style - one that may or may not be of my own family. The audience may not have time to catch each image as it projects. This space is somewhat contradictory as the sound invites a still, deep listening, while the visual punctum demands an active seeking out. In some ways this represents the complementary difference between the two senses; sight being an outward expansion of the body, with listening as the internal collector. here the gallery is considered a mostly sonic space, darkened, with occasional flashes of light from the momentary photograph projection. When an image is projected, the accompanying ‘soundtrack’ goes silent. Various exposure times will be incorporated varying the lengths of light and sound.
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Thank you: Dazibao and PRIM.