Veils of a Bog
with Vanessa Brown, 2018
Installation with Vanessa Brown
Sound installation: Post Meridiem, a 26-minute multichannel durational drone, shown with Vanessa Brown’s mobile sculptures
The Witching Hour, Esker Foundation, Calgary, May 26 – September 2, 2018. Curated by Shauna Thompson
Western Front, Vancouver, September 14 – October 20, 2018. Curated by Pablo de Ocampo
From the Western Front:
“Peaty and tannic, soft and saturated with water, a bog is a place brimming with life forms, yet built on a bed of decay. Veils of a Bog is a collaboration between artists Vanessa Brown and Michelle Helene Mackenzie that combines Brown’s material practice in sculpture with Mackenzie’s multichannel sound composition Post Meridiem. Slowly rotating in a dark gallery, three steel-armatured mobiles clad with paper, fabric, leaves and moss are suspended in an aural wash of crickets, toads, birds and a blanket of droning tones, imagining the bog as a meditative and regenerative place.”
Post Meridiem was produced for Vanessa Brown’s solo exhibition The Witching Hour at the Esker Foundation, then shown at the Western Front as a two-person exhibition with Brown. Together, Brown’s sculpture and Mackenzie’s sound installation combine light, sculpture, movement and sound, reflecting on cycles of time from the circadian to the epochal and planetary. Post Meridiem is a durational drone in three movements, composed with modular synthesis and found field recordings.
Video documentation (Western Front, 2018) ↗
Images: John Dean, Esker Foundation, 2018. Video documentation: Alysha Seriani (videography), Lief Hall (editing), Western Front, 2018.
Writing
Pablo de Ocampo, Exhibition essay ↗
Western Front, 2018
Gillian Haigh, Speculative Methodologies: Veils of a Bog at the Western Front ↗
Peripheral Review, 2018
Steffanie Ling, Veils of a Bog at Western Front, Vancouver ↗
Akimbo, 2018
Michael Turner, Vanessa Brown and Michelle Helene Mackenzie, Western Front
Canadian Art, 2018
Laurie White, Polyphonic Assemblage: A Musical Toolkit for Ecological Perception (talk)
Access Gallery, 2019