JOSHUA BONNETTA | STRANGE LINES AND DISTANCES
TUESDAY 03 APRIL 2012 – SATURDAY 21 APRIL 2012
OPENING RECEPTION | SATURDAY 14 APRIL 2012, 2:00PM – 5:00PM
In partnership with the 25th Images Festival.
Strange Lines and Distances is a two-channel audiovisual installation focusing on Guglielmo Marconi’s first transatlantic radio broadcast. The work is inspired by Marconi’s belief that sound never diminishes, but rather grows incrementally fainter and fainter. He believed that with an adequately sensitive receiver, one could amplify the echoes of history. Strange Lines and Distances looks at and listens to the past, revisiting Marconi’s original transmission sites in order to explore the hauntological aspects of radio and landscape. The installation invites a consideration of the monumental impact of the first wireless transmission, and explores the medium’s potential to conflate and fragment both space and time. Strange Lines and Distances takes its title from a passage in Francis Bacon’s utopian text New Atlantis, in which Bacon imagines a futuristic society’s culture, politics, history and media. In contradistinction, Strange Lines and Distances moves backwards, retrospectively exploring the invention of radio while looking for echoes and historical intimations of the past within the present.
Strange Lines and Distances’ dual channels represent the transmission site in Poldhu Cove, U.K. and the receiving site at Fever Hospital, St. John’s, NL. Each historical site is documented using 16mm colour negative film. The sonic composition was created from site-specific field recordings, shortwave and longwave radio recordings and archival material. Mired in static and atmospheric interference, the recordings exist as fragmentary spectres of outport beacons, noise, musical passages and human voice. Visually, each channel contains imagery that resonates and rhymes with the opposing channel in terms of shape, line, colour, light and optical geometry. Through a visual examination of the sites’ topographical similarities, the work plays with the juxtaposition of landscape, architectural ruins, flora, and geological and meteorological phenomena. The images unfold as a series of long shots, and this play with duration creates a montage that asks the spectator to consider distance and the poetics of form.
JOSHUA BONNETTA is an artist working with film, video and sound in various modes of theatrical exhibition, performance and installation. His work has been shown within North and South America, the UK, Europe, Russia and South Korea. He is the 2009 recipient of the National Film Board of Canada’s Best emerging/mid-career Canadian filmmaker award from the Images Festival.
Location | 140-401 Richmond St. W Toronto, 0N M5V 3A8
Gallery Hours | Tuesday-Saturday 11:00am-5:00pm
Joshua Bonnetta: Strange Lines and Distances, 2012. Photo credit: Allan Kosmajac