Share

Simcoe, On – October 27, 2015 From Sunday, November 15 – Sunday, November 22 the Norfolk Arts Centre will host Quebec-based artists, Instant Places (Laura Kavanaugh and Ian Birse) for a one-week residency. In August of 2014, Kavanaugh and Birse visited Simcoe, ON to conduct research on the Norfolk War Memorial Carillon Tower. With the assistance of head carillonneur, Jim Nicholl, the artists spent three days learning about the carillon and recording the sounds of its bells. The November residency is a follow up to this research period which laid the ground for a new audiowork called CLOSENESS.

During the residency Kavanaugh and Birse will set up a media lab at the Arts Centre to complete work on CLOSENESS. In their Instant Places projects Kavanaugh and Birse use hardware/software systems of their own design to present generative installations and performances. The public is invited to visit Instant Places during their working sessions to listen to the bells being reworked in surround sound and to observe their process of sound augmentation.

The Norfolk residency aims to achieve a balance between the opportunity for Instant Places to develop new work and the opportunity for local residents to engage with the artists through a series of open working sessions and one-on-one engagements. Further to this, Kavanaugh and Birse will be meeting with visual arts classes from Norfolk County high schools.

Laura Kavanaugh and Ian Birse began working as a team in 1997, and from 1997 to 2002 traveled throughout Canada and Europe, making installation and performance works for festival venues and art galleries. Highlights from that period include projects for the Kassel Documentary Film Festival, BACKUP festival (Weimar), and LEM Festival (Barcelona). From 2003—2010 they realized Instant Places projects on location across Canada, Australia, and among others, Japan. Since basing themselves in Hull, Quebec in 2010, they have created installations of generative art for the Peterborough Art Gallery, Interaccess, Toronto, and The Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery in Sarnia, as well as mobile broadcasting projects for Sound Symposium, St. John’s, and Truck Gallery’s CAMPER in Calgary. Most recently Laura and Ian have been presenting performance and installation iterations of a new generative/interactive audiovisual artwork entitled SLEEPER.

Photos from the August 2014 research trip can be seen on the Instant Places blog: http://instantplaces-canadawide.blogspot.ca/; and video can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsuqMaWS_Lc

Instant Places would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for this residency project.

-30-

For more information:
Deirdre Chisholm
Director/Curator
Norfolk Arts Centre
21 Lynnwood Ave.
Simcoe, ON N3Y 2V7
(519) 428-0540
[email protected]
www.norfolkartscentre.ca