NEWS: Through a Window: Open Call To SFU Students For Soundwork and Compositions
Denise Ryner | april 2, 2015
Through a Window: Visual Art and SFU 1965-2015 is a multi-part group exhibition across SFU Galleries that looks at visual art production in and around SFU over the last fifty years. Literally considering the window at each of SFU Galleries’ locations as asocial, spatial and material symbol, the exhibition takes upHenri Lefebvre’s development of Rhythmanalysis as a framework for reflecting on the rhythms of the past five decades in a flow between the university and the city. The works in exhibition speak to the local, national and international shifts in aesthetics, theory, pedagogy, technology and politics.Through a Window will take place at SFU Gallery Audain Gallery and Teck Gallery from June 3 to August 1, 2015 and is curated by Amy Kazymerchyk and Melanie O’Brian.
Rhythmanalysis as described by Lefebvre is a way of perceiving and positioning oneself in relation to the quotidian patterns and cycles that construct place.[i] These perceptions are gathered through the observation of exteriors and interiors experienced physiologically, sensorially and socially. The function of rhythmanalysis expands beyond phenomenology to also engage past and repeated presences. These excerpts from Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis: space, time, and everyday lifehelp to explain the way a rhythmanalyst composes a range of interior and exterior observations as both a spectator and participant in public and private space:
The rhythmanalyst will not be obliged to jump from the inside to the outside of observed bodies; he should come to listen to them as a whole and unify them by taking his own rhythms as a reference: by integrating the outside with the inside and vice versa.
The rhythmanalyst calls on all his senses. He draws on his breathing, the circulation of his blood, the beatings of his heart and the delivery of his speech as landmarks. Without privileging any one of these sensations, raised by him in the perception of rhythms, to the detriment of any other. He thinks with his body, not in the abstract, but in lived temporality.
SFU Galleries would like to extend Lefebvre’s process of rhythmanalysisto the creation and performance of sound work, while also acknowledging the creation of the World Soundscape Project and the development of sound studies at Simon Fraser University. Furthermore SFU Galleries would like to consider sound work as a strategy to acknowledge Hastings Street as a connective corridor between SFU and the city. The Galleries would therefore like to include compositions and soundscapes by SFU students, alumni and faculty in its exploration of the University’s histories. Ideally sound work would be informed by a site, experience or history —whether personal or public— along the Hastings Street corridor or on the bus routes that travel it. There is no durational minimum or maximum for the work submitted to this call.
Submitted work will be presented and archived on a webpage created to highlight both these works and their composers. The webpage will also provide a hub for the public to download each sound work submission for independent listening to accompany their travel along Hastings Street or visit to SFU Galleries’ exhibitions. Based on these sound work submissions, SFU Galleries will invite some students to publically present their work at the Teck Gallery during the afternoon of Saturday June 20th. Participants at the June 20th event will be offered a performance fee.
- Submissions should be formatted as minimum 192 kbs sized MP3s and forwarded to denise_ryner@sfu.ca by May 4, 2015
- Submissions should be accompanied by the artist or composer’s name, a brief bio, contact info and a brief statement about the work.
- No equipment or technical assistance will be offered by the gallery for the production of compositions or soundscapes.
- Questions can be directed to Curatorial Assistant, Denise Ryner atdenise_ryner@sfu.ca
Please see more about The World Soundscape Project and SFU Galleries at the following links:
http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/wsp.html
http://www.sfu.ca/galleries.html
[i] Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: space, time, and everyday life.London: Continuum, 2004.
(Images: CD cover for The Vancouver Soundscape 1973; Philippe Ménard at the ICMC 1985 noon hour concert)
For more information on Through a Window: Visual Art and SFU 1965-2015 click here.