Vancouver New Music, Vancouver Art Gallery mount Auditory Borderlands – Sounding The Dusk Meridian, April 28
Immersive experience set to live music lets people move through Keith Langergraber’s installation at the VAG’s Offsite space
Keith Langergraber, The Dusk Meridian, 2021, site-specific installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite. Photo by Ian Lefebvre/Vancouver Art Gallery
Vancouver New Music and Vancouver Art Gallery co-present Auditory Borderlands – Sounding The Dusk Meridian on April 28 at 8:15 pm at the Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite space (1100 West Georgia Street). In the event of rain, the performance will take place May 5.
AN ENSEMBLE OF Vancouver musicians will bring Keith Langergraber’s installation The Dusk Meridian to sonic life with Auditory Borderlands — Sounding The Dusk Meridian. Viewers will be able to move throughout the work at VAG’s Offsite space to create their own ever-shifting aural and visual perspectives.
Key features of Vancouver- and Kelowna-based multimedia artist Keith Langergraber’s site-specific piece are scaled-down representations of two fire towers that are physically close but imaginatively separated; the real-life versions sit on either side of the Canada-U.S. border at the southern boundary of E.C. Manning Provincial Park. Bathed in phantasmagoric light, the towers are surrounded by tree stumps and sit in a shallow pool of water, the work evoking crossing a point of no return: the passing from light into darkness. Here, the widespread devastation wrought by wildfires, a force of nature unconstrained by borders, becomes the norm.
To create an ambient musical reading of the installation, musicians Matthew Ariaratnam, Adrian Avandaño, Ross Birdwise, Soressa Gardner, and prOphecy sun will be arranged within the plaza, taking the sculptural and lighting elements of the work as a polydimensional score.
“Auditory Borderlands will be an exciting response to the structure and location of The Dusk Meridian, in which “sounding” will extend the themes Keith Langergraber has raised in his work by facilitating their resonance in the viewer’s body,” Grant Arnold, Vancouver Art Gallery’s Audain curator of British Columbia art, said in a release. “Auditory Borderlands will add unanticipated and surprising layers of meaning to Langergraber’s evocative installation.”
The Dusk Meridian takes its name from the moment in time between the setting of the sun and the onset of darkness and the geographical location of this phenomenon, which perpetually traverses the rotating surface of the planet. The installation’s title is also a nod to Cormac McCarthy’s The Blood Meridian, an apocalyptic neo-biblical novel set on the border between the U.S. and Mexico.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with the Vancouver Art Gallery in bringing together five, fantastic musicians to create this live, sonic interpretation of The Dusk Meridian,” Vancouver New Music assistant curator Heather McDermid said in a release. “Drawing on the visual form of the sculpture and the ideas that it explores, the musicians will “read” the work as a sound score extended in multiple dimensions – spatial and temporal, as the sound piece will unfold as dusk falls.
“With his site-specific installation, Langergraber explores the notion of borders as liminal spaces, and boundaries that are often blurred or arbitrary,” McDermid said. “This provides a great conceptual starting point from which to blend visual and sonic interpretations of these themes to creates a truly unique interplay between sound and sculpture.”
Read more about The Dusk Meridian in Stir’s Q&A with Langergraber here.
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