Storehouse Gallery, Shipwrecks Museum
2-24 Nov 2019 | Thur-Sun | 10am-4pm
FREE
Special Event
The Patina of Memory, a musical activation of the Soundmarks installation.
Sun 17 Nov, 5.30 – 6.30pm
Featuring: Lindsay Vickery (Bass Clarinet), Philip Waldron (Double Bass), Stuart James (Keys and Percussion), Ryan Burge (Electronics).
The equivalent of landmarks, soundmarks can define places through demarcation of space and all that exists within it. But because sound is ephemeral, our memory of it rarely endures long past its production. Composer Ryan Burge and visual artist Jenn Garland present a site-responsive soundscape installation that explores how sense of place is refracted through cultural memory and nostalgia.Together they abstract and reimagine soundmarks, objects and artefacts from the Fremantle area which embody the port city and evoke it’s past. Located in the Shipwreck Museum’s Storehouse Gallery within the historic former Commissariat Building, the installation considers the function and context of the building over time. ‘Soundmarks’ blends authentic and alternate histories, acknowledging that both sound and memory always remain subjective representations of reality.
Ryan Burge is a composer and sound artist currently completing his Honours in Composition and Music Technology at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts. His recent works explore what we might call hyperreal soundscapes. Collages of sounds taken from the natural environment, archival records, musical samples, speech and composed material are subjected to studio processing, editing and abstraction to create sonorous palimpsests that investigate the intersection of nature and culture.
Jenn Garland’s practice borrows from the language and methods of science, by adopting a research approach to creating and questioning meaning. Fieldwork, physical experiments, and archival records are used in a quasi-scientific manner. This reflects her background working as a researcher. Often site-specific, her work explores landscapes which bear the scars of industry and reveal the ‘myth of progress’. Here spaces that are temporary, obsolete, abandoned, derelict, liminal and infrastructural are exposed as sites of conflict over values and power.
PRESENTING PARTNERS
WA Maritime Museum