The Murder of Crows by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
January 31-May 9, 2010
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, The Murder of Crows. Installation photograph, Art Gallery of Alberta, 2010.
Photo supplied by the AGA.
Programming
Lecture - Cardiff/Miller
January 28, 2010, 7:00 pm
Telus Centre Lecture Theatre; 111 St. & 87 Ave., University of Alberta Campus
$15 / $10 AGA Members
Purchase tickets now
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are two of Canada’s most renowned and celebrated artists, and the artists behind the AGA exhibitions The Murder of Crows and Storm Room. Their multimedia installations have become known for raising questions about human perception and the experience of illusion versus reality. They discuss their work in this special lecture co-presented by the University of Alberta.
Art-in-Context - Cardiff/Miller
May 4, 2010, 6:00 pm
6 pm, $35 / $28 AGA Members, (+gst, includes refreshments)
Limited enrollment – book early!
Art history classes based on our exhibitions are available throughout the year. Each class includes an introduction and a private tour of the featured exhibition. Enrollment is limited; questions and discussion encouraged.
Final week! Exhibition closes May 9,
2010.
Installation of new exhibitions
starts May 10. Please click here for
important information about special rates and gallery closures times.
The AGA is proud to present the North American premiere of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Millers installation: The Murder of Crows, their largest sound installation to date. The work has been shown in Sydney, Berlin and Brazil, but comes to Canadian audiences for the first time as part of the AGA's opening exhibitions.
The work will occupy the entire third floor of the new Art Gallery of Alberta. Consisting of 98 speakers, The Murder of Crows is a complex interweaving of voice, music and sound that have generated a profound physical impact on the listener. The work has been conceived in acts, but one whose images and narratives structures are created by sound alone. The three-part work, composed in collaboration with Freida Abtan, Tilman Ritter and Titus Maderlechner, is 30 minutes in duration.
The title of the work, The Murder of Crows, refers to the English term for a group of those birds and to the strange occurrence known as a 'crow funeral': when a crow dies, many other crows converge around the body and caw, perhaps in lament. Another central reference to the work is the etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Francisco de Goya from the series Los Caprichos, 1799. In this suite of etchings, Goya took a critical look at tyranny, ignorance and superstition. In an epoch characterized by political and social upheavals, wars and insurrections, he warned that imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters.
In the installation, one hears a voice, coming from a megaphone that lies on a table at the center of the room. Like Goya's sleeping man, the speaker is a captive of their own nightmares, experiencing dreadful scenes fraught with fear and terror. Sounds and noises roam the space of the exhibition like the owls and bats that flit around the sleeper in Goya's etching. In the transition from one sound world to the next, the work's structure follows the illogical yet interrelated progressions of dreams.
In this installation, Cardiff and Miller employ and expand on the technical processes that they developed for earlier works such as The Forty Part Motet (2001), The Berlin Files (2003) and Pandemonium (2005).
