Conduit
Jamie Drouin and Trudi Lynn Smith
Opened Saturday, April 16, at 4:00 p.m.
Continued to April 30

Conduit was an installation of light and sound by local artists Jamie Drouin and Trudi Lynn Smith. The opening reception was on Saturday, April 16, starting at 4:00 p.m. The exhibition continued until April 30, 2011.

The visual component of Conduit was based on principles of the camera obscura, while the sound elements were drawn from the pressure changes from the weather outside the gallery and shifting of the building itself. Drouin and Smith took the sights and sounds that entered the gallery naturally and amplified them.

“Our installation is a conduit to whatever experience we can sense through the frequencies of light and sound that we manipulate on their way into the building and gallery space. That is, rather than sending out new signals, the installation picks up on what comes to and what impacts the building. Visitors come to the gallery to hear and to see, but what sounds and visuals does the gallery itself produce? Through the locale of Open Space, we act as conduits and collectively bear witness to these transmissions.”

- Jamie Drouin and Trudi Lynn Smith

Sound artist Jamie Drouin explores the subtleties of experience, with a specific interest in the way audio can dramatically alter perceptions of both physical and temporal space. His installations, compositions, and improvised performances examine noise pollution and the auditory phenomena of environments. Drouin has exhibited and performed worldwide, including the Biennial of the Americas (Denver), Mutek (Montreal), TodaysArt (The Hague), Decibel Festival (Seattle), Montréal Museum of Contemporary Art (Montreal), Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Communikey (Boulder), La Société de Curiosités (Paris), and General Public (Berlin)

Trudi Lynn Smith brings art, anthropology, and curatorial practice to bear on her studies of place. She holds degrees from Dalhousie University, Emily Carr University, and the University of Victoria, Canada. She recently received an interdisciplinary PhD from the Departments of Anthropology and Visual Arts at the University of Victoria and is currently in a Post-Doctoral position at York University. In 2007, Trudi participated in the Artist Residency “Walking and Art” at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

This project was the result of a call for submissions by the Convergent Boundaries committee, Kristy Farkas, Judith Price, and Christopher Rieche.
 

Video interview by Exhibit-V.

Project Statement

CONDUIT
a collaboration between Trudi Lynn Smith and Jamie Drouin
multi-channel audio and natural light installation, 2011

In one of his notes from The Box of 1914, Marcel Duchamp proposes a challenge, to “make a painting of frequency.” It is from this suggestion that the installation, Conduit, takes direction. As Craig Adcock (1992) points out in an essay about Duchamp, while frequency is something that we normally correlate with sound, it can actually be used to describe the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Frequency is a “matter of wavelength” and this matter can be manifest as sound or light. While much of the history of art is premised upon difference -- thereby separating sonic and visual artists -- the genesis of light and sound is found in shared wavelengths, or frequencies. Indeed, sound waves are essentially the same as light waves, and it is translation by the human body into sound or vision that separates the wave into different experiences. Our bodies act as conduits to these transmissions.

Conduit draws upon the productive friction of these shared waves to generate a site specific work for Open Space Gallery. Using the central skylight in the gallery as a starting point, we direct frequencies into the gallery space using physical representations: light and sound. The installation channels the everyday experience of the celestial sphere into the gallery space to produce a particular experiential encounter by using a pinhole aperture and contact microphones.

The visual component of the installation is based upon a simple camera obscura design. The view from the skylight enters through a small aperture, and is reflected by several small mirrors onto a wall inside the darkened gallery. Rather than attention being placed upon the resulting image produced by the aperture of the camera obscura, however, this installation draws attention to the beams of light as they cross the gallery, taking on a funnel shape as they extend further away from the source. The light beams become a distinct object, and are made more visible through the subtle addition of a non-toxic haze machine. The shafts of light are in constant flux, changing in intensity and hue with the time of day, weather, and movement outside, thereby linking the gallery to the ever changing nature of the environment just outside of the gallery skylight.

The sound component comes from the the building itself. It is a factual processing of frequencies vibrating through the structure using geophones to represent the low frequency vibrations caused external activities, and the expansion or contraction of the building through temperature. A complex wire grid creates a secondary source, becoming an antenna focused on the ambient electrical noise patterns in the space throught the aid of an RF tuner. Four subwoofer speakers discreetly positioned in the corners of the gallery, and smaller speakers above, translate these external sonic influences into a physical experience inside the gallery.

The microphones and the aperture pick up slow moving events of the sky as well as their interaction with the building to create an ever-evolving diagram of sight and sound. Visitors entering the darkened space can freely interact with the environment produced through Conduit, even walking through the path of the light beam to temporarily reflect and modulate the image. This deceptively simple installation is a way to draw attention to the idea that light and sound, photography and sonic works, are not hard truths, but rather are complex manipulations of light and sound that are found in a shared genesis. We are interested in the interrelationship between the two mediums and what emerges in an experiment to physically represent the same waves. Photography and audio are something we think that we understand, simply through recognition of signals. We typically categorize incoming frequencies -- as in, this is the sound of a dog barking, or this is a photograph of a tree -- but what occurs when we examine the process of sight and sound in their most fundamental terms?

This question is key to the work, as we are interested in exploring how we receive signals, and how perceptions are based in large part upon assumptions. Our installation is a conduit to whatever experience we can sense through the frequencies of light and sound that we manipulate on their way into the building and gallery space. That is, rather than sending out new signals, the installation picks up on what comes to and what impacts the building. Visitors come to the gallery to hear and to see, but what sounds and visuals does the gallery itself produce? Through the locale of Open Space, we act as conduits and collectively bear witness to these transmissions.

By producing an installation as an experiential and ongoing encounter we draw attention to the complex, contingent and fundamental impermanence of our world, as it is produced from a relationship between visual and aural experience. We work against the grain of technologies of representation that often split sonic and visual arts by producing an environment that is not premised upon representation and record. Rather than freeze an event into a photograph or into a recording, we play with the ongoing flux and instability of light and sound and the relationship formed between them.