Grey light. Left and right back, high up, two small windows
Fogo Island Arts is pleased to present a major new piece by Hannah Rickards. Grey light. Left and right back, high up, two small windows (2014) is a two-screen projected video installation with eight channels of sound. Structured rhythmically around the pattern of a foghorn sounding, the piece finds its origins in the notion of the foghorn as an auditory marker for non-visibility, or imagelessness.
about Grey light. Left and right back, high up, two small windows
Works that interest me most have a fragility or an indeterminacy to their form, surface, boundaries – works that, in Cage’s words are “less like an object and more like the weather.”
— Hannah Rickards in conversation with Adam Chodzko
The piece is a choreography for camera and two performers developed on the basis of recordings of Seldom Community Hall, the only meeting room on Fogo Island within which the foghorn is audible. One screen presents slow, punctuated tracking shots of the hall, that were used as a ‘score’ for the performers and camera, whose shifting series of gestures and interactions are shown on the other screen.
The sound presents a detailed spatial image of Seldom Community Hall, with the room acting as a container for those sounds generated by the atmospheric conditions outside, such as the percussive clack of the air vent, the radiators and the foghorn itself; this varies in audibility, and is at times registered only in the paused movements and gestures of the performers.
Across the six movements of this piece, which takes cues from the compositional approaches of composers such as Morton Feldman and John Cage, the dynamics of action, causation, form and improvisation shift across the two screens of the work and beyond it into the staging and framing of the exhibition: objects, images and diagrams used as props within the footage are also present in the gallery.
The work’s non-linear structure involves a series of overlapping frames of reference. Within this, a continuous drift back and forth between different forms of attention allows one to look as one might listen, and listen as one might look.
A forthcoming catalogue including texts by Melissa Gronlund and Will Holder and a conversation between Hannah Rickards and Nicolaus Schafhausen will accompany the exhibition.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Director/editor: Hannah Rickards
Producer: Asta Meldal Lynge
Sound designer: Marco Dölle
Colorist: Jason R. Moffat
London
Actors: Catriona James and Ted Schmitz
DoP & lighting : Edward Tucker
Sound recording: Charlie Nash
Runners: Camille Summers Valli and Bryony Hussey
Fogo Island
DoP: Asta Meldal Lynge
Sound recording: Marco Dölle
Technician: Cyril Lynch
Production coordinator: Jack Stanley
Production assistants: Heather Morton and Iris Stünzi
Production support from Luke Hall, Fraser Muggeridge, NIFCO (Newfoundland Independent Filmmakers Co-operative), Justin Penton, Andy Ramsay, Ruaidhri Ryan, Justin Simms, Sally Shaw, Tilly Shiner, Paul Teigh and Nikhil Vettukattil
Co-curators: Nicolaus Schafhausen and Jack Stanley
