From Far and Wide: The Soundscapes
Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George, BC - Feb 6 – April 5
Songs and sound works continue to wind their way through contemporary art galleries and museums, adding dimension to what was once a wholly visual experience. Two Rivers Gallery is no different.
As the exhibition title suggests, sonic offerings cover a range of territory—in this instance, the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North America. Like the confluence of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers (after which the gallery is named), these coasts, once merged, conceive an impossible space only reachable by sound.
Artists Mathieu Léger, Ian Foster and Anju Singh each work in and through a range of media and sonic genres. Of the three, Léger, a finalist for the 2024 Sobey Art Award, is most familiar to visual art audiences for his drum kit– driven performance drawings. In one example, the artist attached graphite to a cymbal. With each strike, a mark was made on an adjacent, vertically aligned piece of paper. For his impression works, the paper is struck directly with a drumstick. As for the drumstick, Léger devised a performance where, through successive rimshots, he wore down the middle of a number of drumsticks, to the point where their frayed sections, once aligned, came to resemble the drawings he made with his cymbals.
For Foster, his is a journey that, like fellow ambient enthusiast Brian Eno, evolved from being a singer-songwriter in the popular idiom to a “crossover classical” artist who, through scoring films, began to make films of his own. Similarly, Singh’s journey took her from multiinstrumental mastery and direct study with composers to an interdisciplinary composition-centred practice that, in her words, “engages in a practice of deconstruction and re-animation as process based methods.”
