On entering the doorway to The Dark Pool, one encounters a realm of suspended animation, an elaborate assemblage of furniture, carpets, books, empty dishes and mechanical paraphernalia. Lit solely by suspended lightbulbs, the space appears to be a laboratory or study, deserted of occupants, it has been left to decay beneath ever accumulating layers of dust and debris. Stacks of books litter the table, some are open to reveal scientific diagrams and notations, essays on paranormal phenomena, popular literature and philosophical texts.
In this overwhelming presence of artifacts, of seemingly obsolete objects, there is a poignancy of absence, as if a life-time's search for knowledge had suddenly been disrupted. Yet, as viewers move through the installation, they activate acoustic components of the work - the silence of the space is broken by strands of music, echoes of stories and fragments of dialogue. These cadences are as bodiless as the space; they hauntingly recall a past that is possibly fictional, but conceivably true. Different voices speak of their experience and offer possible explanations. Their fractured accounts, conversations and tangential correlations circulate around the narrative of the "Dark Pool," an enigmatic abyss of water, a fictional place that has become a part of folklore and shared memory.
A well-traveled trunk sits diagonally across the edge of a table. Its lid is open and airline tags hang from its handle. Inside is a miniature diorama of The Dark Pool in its early days, before anyone but the locals knew about it. A few cars sit in the makeshift parking lot. Someone has strung a string of lights across the gorge to illuminate its shiny, black surface.
Despite a seeming irresolution of meaning, of apparently discontinuous voices, each tale is related on the axis of the narrative thread. Although appearing illogical and atemporal, every account contributes to a larger narrative, to the work's examination of the relationship between fact and fiction and of the impossibility of their resolution within memory.
Our experience of the sounds recalls how memory can be both an evocation of past events and a confusion of subconscious associations. In the Babel of information, knowledge is potentially infinite, yet memory fully determined. The telling of stories is in conflict with the use value and functional intention of information. The seemingly obsessive accumulation of books, their confusion and multiplicity, becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of ever being able to assimilate an endlessness of data. Yet, the links of each sound - each reference - to our individual memories, is akin to a revelation of the miraculous, of meaning that is unattainable through rational analysis. Over time, the story continues to hold this evocative power as it claims a new place in the memory of each listener, becoming one more subconscious association - a new fiction that holds its own truth.
When the creator of the laboratory, the library or the story is gone, their representation of the reality which they have lived becomes a part of history that can never be fully explained. The audio component of The Dark Pool is thus essential to the work's story-telling function. From Mnemosyne, the rememberer, we know that a story is formed through memory and verbally recounted to be passed on in the form of remembrance. With each re-telling, however, events are forgotten and additions are made. The story evolves with each listener, becoming a seemingly limitless pool of facts, fictions and memories.
Operating within the sensory registers of both the visual and the aural, the construction of The Dark Pool emphasizes its occupation of space and of the viewer's existence within it. The viewer is both an interruption of its silence and a necessity for its completion. Their movements enact a form of echolocation, in which the things are perceived through the recognition of reflected sound. The manipulation that is possible by audio and recording technologies, our ability to hear and re-hear the sound tracks again and again, ruptures the continuum of space and time in which verbal narration - story-telling - has historically functioned. Their temporality, as that of the sound tracks, activates the static accumulation of the archive and parallels the dynamism of memory and shared history.
As a complement to The Dark Pool installation, Cardiff and Miller have developed a project for the World Wide Web, which transfers the physical experience of the work into the format of hyper-text. Guided by a schematic diagram, the texts, images and sounds become a series of interconnected events, with possibilities for expansion into infinite relations. The construction of this computer-based project is conceptually analogous to the viewer's experience of the space of the gallery. The Dark Pool installation and Web project are constructed to let you wander through a maze of visual relationships, textual links and loops in time.
On behalf of the Walter Phillips Gallery, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the artists, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, for their invaluable contribution to this exhibition; to Mac Keith, Marc Hutchison, Mark Richardson, Diana Sherlock and Doug Smith for their advice and assistance; to Scott Leslie and Glenda Montgomery for the realization of the World Wide Web project; to Tim Westbury at Zero G Design for the design of this brochure, and to gallery staff: Daina Augaitis, John Burrill, Deborah Cameron, Mimmo Maiolo and Gavin Woolston for their continued support.
Catherine Crowston
Exhibition Curator
The Walter Phillips Gallery is financially supported by the Banff Centre, the Canada
Council, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, a division of Alberta Lotteries, sales and
donations.