previews

  • Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Killing Machine, 2007, mixed media, dimensions variable.

    Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Killing Machine, 2007, mixed media, dimensions variable.

    Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

    Art Gallery of Ontario
    317 Dundas Street West
    April 10–August 18, 2013

    Curated by Kitty Scott and Bruce Grenville

    This survey of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s collaborations brings together eight installation works made between 1995 and 2010. Viewers will encounter a series of environments, including a miniature diorama (the 1999 Muriel Lake Incident, for which you put on earphones and poke your head into the eerily accurate model), some rooms you can’t enter (as in the cabin-size construction Opera for a Small Room, 2005, seemingly possessed by poltergeists), and newer works you can huddle in with a good friend (such as the abandoned dentist’s office of Storm Room, 2009). This duo’s characteristic mayhem is consistently orchestrated via computer programming of precisely recorded binaural sounds that, as the show will surely demonstrate, run the gamut from whispers aimed only at you to bone-rattling thunder and lightning that seem to shake the world.