World-Renowned Works from the Artists’ Inventory
Cardiff Miller Art Warehouse, Enderby, BC - Ongoing
Back in the 2000s, the work of Shuswap-based artists Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller seemed to be everywhere. This had much to do with the popularity of their theatrically based movement and sound installations, their ferocious work ethic and a prolificacy that was all the more impressive given the works’ intense technical requirements. Though their award-winning installations are in museum collections worldwide, they managed to warehouse enough artist’s proofs to one day open a museum of their own.
That day came in July 2023, after the duo acquired the former Ashley Furniture showroom in Enderby, BC, and opened the Cardiff Miller Art Warehouse with an exhibition of four installations. Between then and now, the Warehouse has attracted over 6,000 visitors and is considered a cultural fixture by residents of what is a largely farming-based community. “This is for the farm kid I used to be,” says Cardiff, “the kid that loved magic and something new or mysterious and also surprising—something that would give me a break from shovelling pigpens!”
More recently, the Warehouse has expanded to 10 installations and includes some of the artists’ best-known works. Included in the current configuration are The Marionette Maker (2014), where a travel trailer becomes an island of robotic marionettes dancing around a lifesize replica of a sleeping Cardiff; The Poetry Machine (2017), an interactive audio work that allows visitors to trigger the voice of Leonard Cohen reading poems from The Book of Longing
(2006); and Forty Part Motet (2001), Cardiff’s arrangement of Thomas Tallis’ choral work “Spem in Alium” (1575), presented through a circle of 40 speakers mounted on mic stands.
