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2009, Audio / video installation
Video projected onto canvas painted by xxx in Open Sky gallery, NWT
Real time audio mixed with pre-recorded soundtrack to create a new soundtrack daily.

“Open Sky Echolocation extends an ongoing experimental video project that explores the history of land and occupation in Southwestern Ontario, the place that I call home.

The project has involved research into the origins of representational and communications technologies in the military, as well as collecting personal and community stories and searching for relations that have been elided or erased.

The installation Open Sky Echolocation mirrors the structure of moving into, out of, around, through… a kind of representational proprioception.  The intention with this project is to explore structures of representation, ways of seeing, and of framing knowledges; and of interconnectedness of narratives, places, histories, and people.

The science of many representational technologies involve a signal being sent out and received back, like an echoing loop.  Echolocating animals emit calls out to the environment and listen to the echoes of those calls that return from various objects in the environment. They use these echoes to locate, range, and identify objects, and for navigation.

A connection to the  land, our mother earth, allows us to feel ‘at home’ when we are far from our birth homes. The media environment that many of us share and to a great extent feel at home in, is often defined in opposition to specific places and contexts.

Video mages from various places and historical contexts are projected onto a painted image evocative of forms and concepts specific to the Dehcho.  The soundtrack that plays along with the video images evokes natures and cultures originating both in the Dehcho and elsewhere.  An additional sound component of the installation includes the viewer in the piece, folding their words and movements into a meditation on home and away.