JANET CARDIFF and GEORGE BURES MILLER
Feedback
Artist's Statement
Power House Memphis is pleased to present two works by Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, who is best known for her walks and audio works, created in collaboration with her partner George Bures Miller.
In the North Gallery is ‘Hill Climbing’ [1999] a short film accompanied by a binaural soundtrack of a walk in the snow with their dog, and downstairs in the South Gallery is ‘Feedback’ [2004] a recent single-track recording of a guitarist playing Jimi Hendrix's version of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock.
Janet Cardiff was born in Brussels, Ontario, Canada, in 1957. She studied at Queen's University (BFA) in Kingston and the University of Alberta (MVA). She currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
George Bures Miller was born in 1960. They currently live and work in Berlin.
The work of Janet Cardiff has been shown in museums worldwide. Recently in the Museum of Modern Art in New York was ‘Forty Part Motet’ [2001], a Reworking of ‘Spem in Alium’ by Thomas Tallis, a forty-track recording of a sixteenth-century chorale presented on forty separate audio speakers.
Cardiff and Miller have been collaborating on sound and video works and installations since the mid-1980s. Making interactive works where visitors are asked to touch, listen and move through environments layered with visual and aural narratives.
‘Hill Climbing’ is a short video watched on a monitor while wearing headphones. The film loops making the summit unreachable, the afternoon endless. The sound technology used means it is experienced three-dimensionally as if noises and voices are inside ones head. It is a spiritual journey suggesting that one should always strive to make that summit, even if one fails the first time - in this case falling in the snow.
Janet Cardiff is an artist who evokes mysteries of visual experience with sound-works.
In ‘Feedback’ we experience the wah-wah deafening sound of his iconic rock rendition of the ‘star-spangled banner’ at Woodstock in 1969 - full of reverb, bent, and each wah-wah note stretching to the max - and literally builds it into an experience by allowing the Power House visitor to become Hendrix.
Releasing the power of his music by pressing the foot-pedal, to hear it at full volume as if at Woodstock - a counter-point to the
headphone experince upstairs.
It was an important moment in American cultural history - that was the culmination of the crusades for civil rights, anti-war protests and the musical revolution of the 1960s - that still have universal meaning now in 2005.
As Hendrix said at the time on stage on august 18, 1969 —
“We play it the way the air is in America today. The air is slightly
static isn't it ? You know what I mean ?”
Janet Cardiff's Wikipedia entry