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GHOST ACOUSTICS
AKVK is Steve Bates, Joshua Bonnetta and Douglas Moffat
Exhibition February 15 – March 21, 2010
Vernissage Thursday, February 18, 5-7 pm
Beginning with Julian Biggs’ 1964 film 23 Skidoo, the FOFA gallery and its peripheral spaces become the sites for an exploded studio of works listening to phantom sounds in film, cities and transmissions.
The studio of AKVK presents a five-week exhibition with accompanying performances, film screenings and workshops. Formed from the constructive interference within the practices of three Montréal-based artists, this exhibition features multiple works each marked by a spatial shifting of cause and effect, of sender and receiver, and each with the ability to travel through walls. The project lays bare the material nature of the immaterial practices of sound, time, and transmission.
“45 years later, the sites and sound of Biggs’ NFB film are re-visited and re-heard as a 16mm film installation.
A faint chorus captured within the stone walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral are transmuted to tape. Forming slow loops they trace the edges of the FOFA vitrine.
A low power radio transmitter broadcasts the sounds of discarded records from local thrift stores.
The first seconds of a Joy Division classic become a late night transmission from a south London garden.
The sound as hands sweep across radio dials are collected from around the world (and trapped under glass).
A feral sound-system is cautiously kept in the gallery, feeding on scavenged audio - only to be let out at night...”
Steve Bates is a media artist, musician, and audio technician whose work revolves around improvised and composed music, radio, and installation projects. He founded and directed the Send +Receive Festival of Sound, now in its eleventh year. Bates is the Sound Coordinator at the Hexagram Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies and is a graduate
candidate in Studio Arts/Open Media at Concordia University.
Joshua Bonnetta was born in Oshawa, Ontario 1979. His body of work has exhibited cinematically, as installation and as live performance. He has shown in Russia, Columbia, U.K., Canada, Ireland, U.S., South Korea, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. In 2009 he was awarded the National Film Board of Canada award for Best Emerging/Mid-career Canadian Film and Video Maker at Toronto's Images Festival. His practice combines sound and various forms of animation to consider the construction of representation within the cinematic image. He has an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University.
Douglas Moffat explores the relationship between sound and the built landscape. Working with field recording, electroacoustics and landscape architecture, his projects are spaces built for listening. Trained as a landscape architect, he completed his MFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University. His graduate thesis project, The Love Song Effect explored the sonic environment of the Las Vegas Strip. He has presented works at the Jardin de Métis Festival international de jardins and the Send + Receive Festival.
This project was made possible through the generous support of Concordia University, CIAM, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
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