prOphecy Sun
Orchard
In the installation, Condensation and other moments, I transformed a workspace into an immersive sensory landscape. I explore the materiality of a weather balloon using it as a metaphor for the entanglement between waking life and dreaming. The images originated from a shoot at an orchard and were projected onto the ceiling and walls of a room that included sprinkler pipes, rafters and other challenging architectural features. I see my experiments with this space as a liberation from convention.
Through the layering of multiple projections and sound compositions the space becomes occupied in new ways. In the performative elements in my work, the body plays a central role, drawing on dream moments and memories. As someone with dance training it is a means through which my artwork comes into form. Movement evokes memories, and lives in the body. Improvisations inspire me to consider that space where the mind becomes just another muscle in the body, and the focus becomes the objective presence of the body as an object and its movement. I use techniques and exercises that allow for new configurations, improvisations and chance encounters that embrace the fluid nature of the dream space.
Failure doesn't exist in improvisation; a failed motion or a failed manoeuvre is absorbed and is integral to the process of the final installation. I interface with what, after theorist Jane Bennett, might be called “vibrant objects,” through a variety of dance and movement traditions such as butoh, martial arts, and modern dance. Referencing recent traditions of performance and Land Art, as well as Object Oriented Ontology—the metaphysical movement that rejects the privileging of human existence over the that of nonhuman objects—I consider how the body responds to the agency of things in the world.
In the installation the video footage from six projectors overlaps, weaves, and bleeds across the ceiling space, in a prismatic display of gradations, colour, sound. Often obscured throughout the illuminations is a figure carrying a weather balloon within lush environments, conjuring images of paradise and wilderness. The installation is drawn from my ongoing research with the weather balloon: a type of high altitude balloon that carries instruments into the troposphere to send back information about atmospheric pressure, temperature, and wind speed. Instead of releasing it into the sky, I engage the balloon in a strange duet, and in the temporarily shared space of experience, negotiate between realms.
The sound composition emerges as a looping array of ambient textures, vocal meanderings, and natural environmental reverberations. The vocals move in and out of focused humming, sliding up and down scales. The interplay between breath and humming slowly increases hopefully producing internal resonance and haunting tones. Condensation and other moments is a sensorial experience. Upon entering the space, the viewer must look up to see the work and explore the area, take note of the building sounds coupled with the ambient sound composition. Through the prismatic imagery and dense sound, the viewer is enticed to immerse themselves in the experience, perhaps invoking a dreamlike encounter between interior vibrations and exterior reverberations.
Bio
prOphecy Sun’s interdisciplinary performance practice treads together both conscious and unconscious choreographies, sound, and environment, to create exploratory works that invoke deep body memory and draw from an interior landscape of dreams. She is a recent graduate from the MAA Visual Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2015 and the recipient of the Governor General’s Gold Award.
She is working on a PhD with MovingStories (a SSHRC funded interdisciplinary partnership) in the School of Interactive Arts + Technology at Simon Fraser University with Dr. Thecla Schiphorst. She is based in Vancouver and is a founding member of Dance Troupe Practice (a movement based performance collective) and current resident at the Pandora Park Fieldhouse. Her experimental performances, sound compositions, installations, videos and collaborations have been exhibited in such events as ISEA 2015, DIS 2014, FUSE at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, International Experimental Cinema Explosion (USA), Your Kontinent Festival: Art in Containers (Richmond), Festival des Musiques Creation (QB), Live- Performance Art Bienalle, Soundasaurus Media Arts Festival (AB), Signal and Noise Media Festival, Exploding Cinema (UK), Square Waves Festival (UK), Dancing on the Edge Festival, Month of Performance Art (Berlin), 12 Min Max, and Low Lives 4 International Festival of Live Networked Performances.
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