Janet Cardiff
Janet Cardiff | |
---|---|
Conceptual Art | |
Spouse | George Bures Miller |
Awards | National Gallery of Canada Millennium Prize; La Biennale di Venezia Special Award; the Benesse Prize; the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize |
Years active | 1995–present |
Janet Cardiff (born March 15, 1957) is a Canadian artist who works chiefly with sound and sound installations, often in collaboration with her husband and partner George Bures Miller. Cardiff first gained international recognition in the art world for her audio walks in 1995. She lives and works in British Columbia, Canada.
Early life and education
Janet Cardiff was born in 1957 in
Solo works
Her first major work based on recorded sound was called The Whispering Room, a minimal work consisting of a dark space with 16 small round speakers mounted on stands that play the voice of individual characters. As visitors move through the space and the voices, a film projector is triggered playing a slightly slow-motion film.[3]
Some of Cardiff's most well-known solo works are her audio walks. Her first was created somewhat serendipitously during a residency at the
Cardiff has been included in exhibitions such as Present Tense, Nine Artists in the Nineties,
In her Forty Part Motet (2001) she placed 40 speakers in 8 groups, each speaker playing a recording of one voice singing
A mid-career retrospective, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works, Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller, opened at
In Real Time (1999) was the very first video walk that Cardiff created. It took place in the library of the Carnegie Museum of Art and begins with the participant donning a pair of headphones attached to a small video camera. Upon playback Cardiff says to watch the screen and follow along with what we see and hear for approximately 18 minutes. This piece relies on the discrepancies between what is seen on the video monitor and what is occurring in the library.
Work with George Bures Miller
"The Dark Pool" was the first multimedia installation collaboration Cardiff and Miller created and showed in 1995 in Vancouver. The work consists of a dimly lit room, furnished with cardboard, carpets, and collected ephemera and artifacts, through which visitors move, triggering sounds such as musical segments, portions of conversations, and bits of stories. Cardiff and Miller consider the work very personal and, despite offers, have not sold it.[4] Cardiff and Bures Miller represented Canada at the 49th Venice Biennale with Paradise Institute (2001), a 16-seat movie theatre where viewers watched a film, becoming entangled as witnesses to a possible crime played out in the real world audience and on the screen. Cardiff and Bures Miller have recently had exhibitions at Fraenkel Gallery,[9] San Francisco (2018), the Art Gallery of Alberta (2010), Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2008) the Miami Art Museum (2007) Vancouver Art Gallery (2005), Luhring Augustine, New York (2004), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2003), Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) (2002), National Gallery of Canada (2002) and Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Ontario (2000). In 2012, she took part along with her husband in the Kassel’s Documenta. They proposed two installations: the first one is an audio installation in the forest called Forest (for a thousand years…) of a 28 minute audio loop. The second one is a 26-minute video walk specially produced for Documenta and called Alter Bahnhof video walk.[10] In 2013, the Art Gallery of Ontario and Vancouver Art Gallery organized Lost in the Memory Palace: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, a selected survey, which took as its focus Cardiff and Miller's work from the mid-1990s to 2013.[11] Recent projects include Thought Experiments in F♯ Minor (2019), a site-specific, immersive, video installation at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; and Cardiff & Miller (2019), a solo exhibition at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey in Mexico.[12]
Awards given jointly to Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
- National Gallery of Canada Millennium Prize (2001);[13]
- La Biennale di Venezia Special Award at Venice, presented to Canadian artists for the first time (2001);[14]
- the Benesse Prize, recognizing artists who break new artistic ground with an experimental and pioneering spirit (2001);[14]
- the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, Germany (2011);[15]
- the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize in honor of their life’s work, which has "opened up new perspectives for sculpture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries" (2020)[12]
See also
References
- ISBN 978-0714878775.
- ISBN 0970442831.
- ISBN 1902201078.
- ^ a b Wray, John (2012-07-26). "Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller and the Power of Sound". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 3 April 2015. Retrieved 1 February 2014.
- ^ "Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller | Walks". Archived from the original on 30 June 2013. Retrieved 1 February 2014.
- ^ "Artangel - The Missing Voice (Case Study B) homepage". Archived from the original on 2015-09-23. Retrieved 2010-08-11.
- ^ "Cybermuse Gallery Artwork Page: Forty Part Motet(2001)". Archived from the original on 2010-05-28. Retrieved 2007-09-09.
- ^ "The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Janet Cardiff". The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Archived from the original on 7 December 2013. Retrieved 1 February 2014.
- ^ "The Poetry Machine and Other Works | Fraenkel Gallery". Fraenkel Gallery. Archived from the original on 2018-05-03. Retrieved 2018-05-02.
- ^ "Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller". Archived from the original on 2013-03-27. Retrieved 2013-02-23.
- ^ "Lost in the Memory Palace". ago.ca. Art Gallery of Ontario. Retrieved 30 January 2022.
- ^ a b "JANET CARDIFF AND GEORGE BURES MILLER WIN WILHELM LEHMBRUCK PRIZE". www.artforum.com. Artforum. Retrieved 30 January 2022.
- ^ "Janet Cardiff: Forty-Part Motet". www.gallery.ca. National Gallery of Canada. Retrieved 30 January 2022.
- ^ a b "Lost in the Memory Palace". www.mcasd.org. Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Retrieved 30 January 2022.
- ^ "Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller". artdaily.cc. Art Daily. Retrieved 30 January 2022.
External links
- Janet Cardiff and George Miller
- Words Drawn in Water
- Tate Liverpool
- "Creating Worlds" Excerpt of profile from ascent magazine
- KultureFlash Interview (01/2003)
- Gregory Mario Whitfield's Whitechapel Review