Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Millennium Galleries, Sheffield
11 February - 18 April
Reviewed by: Meriel Herbert
Cardiff is best known for her audio 'walks' made over the past decade. Alongside these she has made audio-visual works for the gallery, many in collaboration with her partner George Bures Miller.
On display at Millennium Galleries are four joint works. Hill Walking and House Burning are both video loops with soundtracks created using binaural recording. As we put on headphones we are transported into the scene on the monitor - we become the man repeatedly struggling to climb a hill, or the person standing dangerously close to a blaze. The Muriel Lake Incident is more complex: we experience being at a cinema, with people either side munching on popcorn, while we are having another experience: watching a film. This layering of different realities and multiple narratives is taken further still in The Berlin Files, a small life-size cinema with surround sound. This uses key devices often employed in B-movies and Cardiff's walks: a female protagonist; multiple personas or identities; confessional voices; being watched/followed; cryptic clues; slippage between the past, present and future; longing and searching for someone or something; the blurring of reality and fiction. The artists purposely leave gaps in our understanding and we are left to solve the mysteries alone.
Cardiff uses the physical and spiritual qualities of pure sound to affect the audience in her individual installation Forty-Part Motet. Forty speakers on stands are placed facing each other in a circle, through which a recording of Salisbury Cathedral Choir singing Spem in Alium Nunquqm Habui by Thomas Tallis is heard. Moving around the space, you come to realise each speaker is playing a different harmony. Cardiff succeeds in making the experience of listening to public singing intimate for the visitor, if just for a moment.
Writer detail:
Meriel Herbert is an artist based in the north of England.
meriel.herbert@blueyonder.co.uk |
www.merielherbert.com
Venue detail:
Millennium Galleries (The)
48 Arundel Gate, SHEFFIELD S1 2PP
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