Drouin,Olsen & Luna in " Sounds in a Room 4 " at Vancouver Island School of Art

SOUNDS IN A ROOM
Friday, June 24 @ 7:30 The next edition of Sounds in a Room welcomes visual artist and teacher John Luna. We're going to follow a different formula this time, using two adjacent classrooms in the top floor of the college, and developing a continuous 1.5hr improvised composition. The audience will be encouraged to move freely between the two rooms, one in which Luna will be working on a chalk board from a prepared (silent) lecture, and the other room where DROUIN/OLSEN will respond to an amplified sounds from the chalk board.

Doors open at 7pm and the performance will continue from 7:30-9pm

2549 Quadra Street- Victoria, BC Canada -
250-380-3500

David Pollock & Jamie Drouin " Tracings " at Luz Gallery

OPENING RECEPTION Wednesday 18-May, 2011 / 7:00pm

David Pollock & Jamie Drouin 

This selection of new photographic works by David Pollock and Jamie Drouin are collected under the banner Tracings. The word signifies not only what is left behind from a process, but also representation through mapping, which shares with photography the precise rendition of a topography.

Pollock’s large-scale colour landscape photographs, documenting the farmlands of Vancouver Island's Saanich Peninsul are contrasted by Douin's minature black and white prints of unknown locations and fragments of urban topography.

In both of these works the artists share a vision of the shifting ground of their environment when presenting traces of activity that continually transform landscapes. Pollock's richly detailed landscapes, from his series Fertile Geometry, presents this elemental topography as a palimpsest upon which we discern the signs of farm work. Pollock places us within a deep open space where the vantage point directs our vision to the soil, which is the skin of the Earth upon which we stand. 

Drouin's intimate pictorial spaces depict the macroscopic intersections of landscape within urban environments. The tiny, fragile prints turn the flotsam and jetsam of urban living into constructions as mysterious and visceral as a crime scene photograph. Extending upon the idea of Tracings, Drouin interrupts the transparency of the photographic window by altering the surface of the print. The scratches, folds and cracks mimic the markings upon the landscape but also refer to the utilitarian uses of photography as evidence or as reference, like a map. 

Although stylistically divergent these photographs speak to us of the remnants of human actions and situate us within a continuum of constant interaction with the natural world. 

ARTIST TALK  Thursday 2-June, 2011 / 7:00pm

"A very self-concious experience" by Christine Clark

The room was in fact so dark that in spite of allowing my eyes to adjust, as the sign suggested I do, I could see very little for a very long time.
Having been there before, on a day that the gallery was closed, but unlocked, and therefore much lighter, I was aware of what was in the space.  But having never been there, alone, in the  relentless dark, I was afraid.
I was drawn to the mirrors.  The only light except for a few red spots for exits.
As I crossed the room, I heard a rapid series of loud knockings on the wall to my right.  I froze.  I remembered that conduit is for receiving transmissions from the dead.  A photograph of me then would have shown a caricature of fear, in mid step, clutching her bags, eyes wide and darting to see in the dark.
The mirrors were a cold light, a paltry comfort, their faces reflecting only in parts the funneled sky,  but I could crouch down near them with my back to the wall and see all the vast expanse of space in front of me.  There was some safety at least.
The sound at first was an intermittent high pitched buzz  unrelated to my own movements.
I decided after a while to make my way past the mirrors and around the false middle wall.  I staggered along, a strong dysphoria rising within me from the pressing sounds and the darkness, and a sense that I might lose my balance.  I could not make it around the wall.  I approached the edge of an emanating darkness so black and enveloping that I could not push past it or through it, even though I did push against it, briefly.  From behind the wall another sound; the continuous rushing of wind or of time passing by; something unstoppable, potentially catastrophic.
I went back to the mirrors, and after a while I could see things.  I began to adjust.  The doorway no longer looked like a yawning cavern.  There were other lights glowing softly from behind curtains.
I went back to the false wall,  I was more confident.  I looked around the wall and it was dark there still, but not as dark.  In the far corner I could see a green sound wave undulating, monitoring or reflecting the conduit.
I saw a shape previously unseen.  It turned out to be a couch.  I went there and sat and saw that the light from the mirrors were reflecting a myriad of light circles, bubbles, on the wall.  I watched them shimmer, but only a little, hardly a shimmer, just the slightest adjustments in brightness really.  I listened to the buzz and the roar and watched the mirrors reflect the light.
I didn't feel completely well.  I wondered if I should lie down.  I felt disoriented and overwhelmed.  Nothing was very loud, but everything was so present.  The darkness, the sounds, the light, me.  I wasn't sure how my physical self fit there.  As a body I was an intruder somewhere so delicate; so self contained; so of the spirit.  I wanted to lie down, to surrender, to spend some indefinable period of time forgetting my body, forgetting everything but what the sounds and the darkness and the light could do, to me.  The bubbles on the wall changed from light to three dimensional shapes rimmed by shadows.  I watched and listened.  I didn't lie down, but I wasn't afraid.  I was still, breathing, and I was there.
Then I heard other noises.  Voices.  People talking. And I felt so vulnerable in my state, that I rushed to pick up my belongings and I left.
At the bottom of the stairs, I saw a dead bird hanging from the ceiling, suspended by a string tied around its black leg.

Open Space
Jamie Drouin
Trudi Lynn Smith
the dead bird

-- 
http://artinvictoria.com/

"Sounds in a Room" at Slide Room Gallery

Friday, April 29, 2011 at 7:30 pm - 2549 Quadra St

“ Sounds in a Room “ by John Luna

[NB: This review is of Sounds in a Room, an ongoing new music series at the Slide Room Gallery (http://www.soundsinaroom.com/) featuring Jamie Drouin, Lance Olsen and guests. It also falls on the opening day of Drouin’s sound/light installation at Open Space with Trudi Lynn Smith, Conduit (http://www.openspace.ca/node/1050) running to April 30^th and midwat through Olsen’s exhibition of paintings and drypoint etchings, The Road to Esperance (through April 28^th at Polychrome Fine Arts http://polychromefinearts.com/. See Also Debora Alanna’s review in Exhibit-V, http://exhibit-v.blogspot.com/2011/04/lance-austin-olsen-road-to-esperance-by.html )]

Sounds in a Room

i. Let’s talk about the weather
Sounds in a Room is a new music series at the Slide Room Gallery featuring collaboration between Jamie Drouin and Lance Austin Olsen (aka DROUIN/OLSEN) with various guest artists from session to session. Billed as “electroacoustic improvisational music”, the performances feature Olsen employing a variety of seemingly humble objects (such as copper etching plate in concert with a short wire brush) to create textured acoustic interactions, and Drouin working with a small modular synthesizer to create a palette echoing modern electronic noise pollution. Both performers rely on a shared sense of meter to work their improvised synchronicity into (and are reflexively sensitive to) ambient traffic within the compass of architecture and audience.

After attending the first session of the Sounds in a Room series, I was attempting to relate my impressions of the experience to a friend and ended up talking about the weather. Noting the imminent end of winter, I recalled the experience of a recent Christmas sitting by a DVD of a log fire burning in a hearth (embarrassing yes, but filling a need: we haven’t had a proper fireplace since moving out of the childhood home fourteen years ago.) The smell of woodsmoke (as unified, all-one-word complex of olfactory & association) with a sensation of sleepy, just-bearable warmth colouring the cheeks called itself forth with almost Pavlovian authority. The fossil of fire peeled and lifted gently away from the facts of fire was still enough fire for fire-as-memory, reminding me that Prometheus, who in Greek mythology stole fire from heaven to give to men, also duped the gods into accepting the aroma of a burnt offering of fat and bones in place of the meat of the matter.

So listening to Olsen roll a small ball of tinfoil over an amplified copper plate is the frying of onions inciting appetite or the prickle of dander creeping up into allergic nostrils, the rise of the hairs on a forearm in sympathy with another’s gooseflesh; sensation as synesthetic, kinaesthetic currency. How voluble it all is now (later), thinking on fire for food or flesh, with those lean ghostly men dressed in black in a dim room, their sparse surgery producing such whittlings of something-from-nothing!

Charles Baudelaire writes that the passage from apprehension to experience is one of voluptuousness to curiosity to an acquired familiarity (volupte – porquoi – connaissance) (1.) Meaning, the shock and tingle of pleasure followed by wonder or inquiry, followed by a sense of seasoned knowing (not the verb savoir ‘to know’ facts, but connaitre, to know one’s friends, or the particulars of a language or a city, or Argentinean cuisine.) Connaitre is the kind of knowing that time temporarily dulls or distances but never truly obliterates so long as the machinery of consciousness remains hardwired to the nervous system.

It is important that the room is dark and that the pieces proceed in an improvised manner. We might begin to know a sound as a sensation cum certitude, but a moment latter a guttering tap or a solid block of drone from Drouin’s electronics obviates the spell of catch-and-release sensory storytelling that you’d begun to weave around that mere, tangible referent you’d half-slept your way into. Lapsing back into uncertainty, you feint at V or P, oscillating between the fresh renderings of sounds in space and the just-passed recollected echoes still hovering between battens, boards and an ear canal.

ii. Remember more, knowing less

So you’re part of an active, thinking conduit that never really knows what it knows (savoir, just the facts ma’am, data as evidence) but acquires familiarities, not without the constant tugging, stretching or shrinking back and forth from scale to scale, state to state, direction to inflection; this a kind of workout for the nerves, “voluptuous” conditioning. And the delight, sitting there in the dark, is in not knowing what one knows, yet, in not knowing what one will know (really know, know all over again, “know in your bones”) one more time, as yet, just any minute now.

Walter Benjamin (referring to Charles Baudelaire via Marcel Proust via In Search of Lost Time and also Freud) wrote: “becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory trace are processes incompatible with each other within one and the same system” (2.) That is, the things we absorb we absorb without telling them to ourselves and the things we tell ourselves we scarcely absorb; childhood (all its great leaps of scale and definition included) in a nutshell. And much of what Drouin & Olsen do of course is about amplifying small incidents to large artefact, a formula that we listeners -curiously self-contained in the manner of hipster aficionados- reverse in the process of internalizing. The big room and long sentences of sound, made miniature keep narrowing in perception towards an impossible dwindling –down, disappearing receipt.

Here now a long passage from Gilles Deleuze’s, "What is Becoming?" referring to Alice in Wonderland, with its inexplicable expansions and contractions as Alice grows tiny or gigantic depending (like Proust) on eating something:

All these reversals as they appear in infinite identity have one consequence: the contesting of Alice’s personal identity and the loss of her proper name. The loss of the proper name is the adventure which is repeated throughout Alice’s adventures. For the proper or singular name is guaranteed by the permanence of savoir. The latter is embodied in general names designating pauses and rests, in substantives and adjectives, with which the proper name maintains a constant connection. Thus the personal self requires God and the world in general. But when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names of pause and rest are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world and God. This is the test of savoir and recitation which strips Alice of her identity. In it words go awry, being swept away by the verbs. (3)

What was I talking about again? Timing is all over the map in search of lost time, with some moments of conclusive cohesion (a grinding sound across the copper plate that goes etching where you knew it must, then rests) and other pockets of loss and awkwardness where I forget myself but feel I’m in familiar terrain just the same, a stepping-on-the-dog-in-the-dark overlap of what Marcel Proust dubbed ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ memory. Claude Levi-Strauss writes:

[…] uncontrolled memory is not simply opposed to conscious memory (which allows one to recall the past without reliving it). Uncontrolled memory breaks into the story line; it readjusts and restabilizes the composition, systematically altering the course and order of events. (4.)

Levi-Strauss argues that uncontrolled memory is not just a subject for Proust, it is integral to his technique; everything is written as it is thought of and ordering comes cut and pasted later. For Proust as a writer, this supplies a freedom not unlike music, substituting rhythmic reoccurrence for the common sense of conventional narrative, a freedom “that allows events or incidents belonging to different time periods to be evoked indiscriminately in the present.”

A prerequisite for what Olsen does in performance must be time spent in-between days listening for friction, and for Drouin, citing time signatures and sizing up intervals.

iii. Practice meeting premise

In a previous existence, Olsen studied painting under teachers like Frank Auerbach and Howard Hodgkin, artists sometimes associated with a “School of London” painting. Though Auerbach, Lucien Freud, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow were notably lionized for maintaining figurative painting at a time when direct drawing from the body had all but vanished from North American art schools, this perspective is somewhat superficial. The salient character that unites the ‘abstract’ paintings of Hodgkin to the portraits of Auerbach is an investing in the relations between sensations found in the world and their digestion and processing through memory as enacted and rehearsed via a time-intensive rhythmic repetition. Local roots for this approach in the UK can be traced to the influence of Francis Bacon (who Olsen used to hear in lecture), and through Bacon, Paul Cezanne:

This is the general thread that links Bacon to Cezanne: to paint sensation or, as Bacon says, using words that loosely resemble Cezanne’s, to record the fact. “It’s a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system.”

And:

When Bacon speaks of sensation, he means two things that are very close to what Cezanne meant. Negatively, he says that form as a it relates to sensation (figure) is the opposite of form as it relates to an object that form is supposed to represent (figuration) […] And positively, Bacon continually says that sensation is that which passes from one “order” to another, from one “level” to another, from one “domain” to another. (5.)

Imagine this transit of sensations, “swept away by verbs”, from one part of the body to another, surging or tapping or dully buzzing; throwing switches, loosening up stray particles like the half-collected residue of a morning dream floated in fits and starts brought up over breakfast. From Jacques Lacan:

Freud describes a dream as a certain knot, an associative network of analysed verbal forms that intersect as such, not because of what they signify, but thanks to a sort of homonymy. It is when you come across a single word at the intersection of three of the ideas that come to the subject that you notice that the important thing is that word and not something else. (6.)

In the case of a painting by Bacon, Auerbach or Hodgkin, there is always some sort of talisman related to the act of witness and experience that stands as token or testament between the world (as in the experience of a close room among strangers, or going for a walk in the street it foul weather) and the artist’s body in the act of painting: for Auerbach it is drawings made from repeated assignations with the same models, for Bacon it was photographs (“a dictionary of appearance”) combined with accidents (such as splattered paint) that “unlocked” a rendered figure with their incidental character, and funnelled through the white noise of compositional props like newspaper photographs, reproductions of other paintings, and film stills. This pattern of repetition and interference gestures towards an artificial deja vue that fruitfully confuses past, present and future, and in doing so conjures the homonymy that Lacan delineates as the stuff of dreams.

Conceive of the white noise and circulating overlap of sound, recall, and sensation in Drouin & Olsen’s work as a similar homonymy. Olsen’s tools are his crappy old guitar underfoot (a painterly instrument if ever there was one), his curls of wire and fistfuls of foil; his talisman or go-between is the copper plate that will later become the medium for his proclivities as a printmaker, literally a catcher of impressions. Drouin is (as anyone who’s met him can attest) a superb runner of interference, as tactful and tactical as they come and also a superb technical photographer. In his “Sketchbook Notes”, Jasper Johns imagines himself as two separate characters, each both actor and audience:

The watchman falls “into” the “trap” of looking. The spy is a different person.
“Looking” is and is not “eating” and “being eaten.”(Cezanne?- each object reflecting the other.) That is, there is a continuity of some sort among the watchman, the space, the objects. The spy must be ready to ‘move’ must be aware of his entrances and exits. The watchman leaves his job and takes away no information. The spy must remember and must remember himself and his remembering. (7.)

“Sounds in a Room” amount to echoes in a sound box or flickers on the wall of a camera obscura. Drouin and Olsen use the dialogic, player-and-audience relationship to simultaneously open up and interiorize mnemonic processing; their pointed division of labour neatly meeting the challenge of maintaining a separation of sound and song, so that their audience become sounding boards, co-producers. As John Cage notes:

What I am calling […] poetry […] is often called […] content
[…]
Hearing […] or making this […] in music […] is not different
- […] only simpler- […] than living this way […] .
[…] Simpler, that is […] , […] for me, - because it happens
[…] that I write music […] .(8.)

NOTES
1. Jonathan Mayne. “Introduction”, Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (New York: Phaidon, 2001) x.
2. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Edited by Hannah Arendt, Translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 160-161.
3. Gilles Deleuze, “What is Becoming?”, The Deleuze Reader, Edited by Constantin V. Boundas (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1993) 41.
4. Claude Levi-Strauss, “Looking at Poussin”, Look, Listen, Read, translation Brian J. Singer, (New York: HarperCollins, 1997) 7.
5. Gilles Deleuze, “Painting and Sensation”, The Deleuze Reader, Edited by Constantin V. Boundas (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1993) 188.
6. Jacques Lacan, “The Place, Origin and End of my Teaching”, My Teaching, Translated by David Macey, (New York and London: Verso, 2008) 28.
7. Jasper Johns, “Sketchbook Notes,” quoted in John Yau, “The Mind and Body of the Dreamer,” Uncontrollable Beauty, edited by Bill Beckley with David Shapiro (New York: Allworth Press, 1998) 298
8. John Cage, “2” from “Lecture on Nothing”, Poems for the Millennium, The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, Volume 2, Edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Peter Joris (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: 1998) 415.

The Fluxus Connection by Philip Willey - April 17th. 2011

Once upon a time, when I was scruffy young Jack Kerouac wannabe hitch-hiking around Europe, I found myself by the Berlin wall. The year was 1965 and I had just ascended an observation platform so that I could look over the wall into the Eastern bloc when a strange sight met my eyes. An elaborate electronic robot and a topless lady playing the cello. It was a cold day and some bemused Berliners were admiring the cellist’s determination. Her name, I discovered later, was Charlotte Moorman [1] and I was witnessing an early event by a group called Fluxus. Allan Kaprow is credited with coining the term Happening as early as 1957. Now it all comes under the heading of Performance.

Fluxus, as the name implies, was more of a loose collaboration than a formal movement. People like Dick Higgins, Ay-O, Nam Jun Paik, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht and Yoko Ono were all members at one time or another. George Maciunas formed the group in New York in 1961 but it really goes back to John Cage or perhaps to Dada and the Futurists.

I wasn’t directly involved with the group but I kept running into them in different places. They actually avoided major galleries, at least in the early days, preferring small venues or the street. They disliked the commercial art scene intensely. Sound familiar? Humour and irreverence were a big part of it. In fact they could be downright naughty. Now of course Nam Jun Paik’s TV installations are much in demand by museums and a Beuys felt suit will set you back about fifty thousand dollars at Sotheby’s. Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano and 4’33’’ have become classics. It’s strange to think they were once considered subversive.

Cage developed what he called ‘indeterminacy’. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living". [2]

All of this is a roundabout way of talking about the work of Lance Olsen and Jamie Drouin and attempting to put them into a historical context. Is there a Fluxus connection I wondered?  Cage’s teachings and innovative approach to composition have certainly been a big influence on a lot of people from Toru Takemitsu to Frank Zappa to Brian Eno. Lady Gaga too for all I know. John Cage opened the door, says Olsen, and we just sauntered through [3]

It may help to look at some of Olsen’s paintings (currently showing at Polychrome Gallery). In a video made by exhibit-v Olsen explains how his paintings begin with marks. Something happens on the surface which suggests a direction. More marks are followed by endless reworking until he decides to stop. It’s not a totally unconscious process because it involves a lot of decisions. Choices are made but the process itself becomes the objective. Olsen calls it ‘the mystery of the organic’. Each painting is a step in a life-long quest. A kind of mapping says Debora Alanna in her insightful review on exhibit-v. [4]

Drouin’s work ‘explores the subtleties of experience, with a specific interest in the way audio can dramatically alter perceptions of both physical and temporal space.’ [5] Jamie Drouin and Trudi Lynn Smith are currently showing an installation called ‘Conduit’ at Open Space which deserves its own review.

Drouin and Olsen team up occasionally ‘to explore their mutual interest in sound as an extension of physical experience, both for the audience and the artists. They use the live stage as a laboratory and continuous work in progress.

Employing a minimalist toolset and, intentionally, no computers, each performance remains distinct and unplanned, focusing on the real-time conversation between the two artists and the freshness of discovery with their respective tools: Drouin's compact suitcase modular, Olsen's amplified copper plates and toy acoustic guitar.’ [6]

So without being didactic or over analytical I hope it is fair to summarize thus:  Drouin and Olsen oblige us to consider the nature of sound and space and how those things affect us. There’s more of course but beyond this point I start to feel out of my depth. Still looking for a Fluxus connection I asked Lance how he sees his work in relation to John Cage and George Brecht. Here is his reply…

“It relates to Cage and Brecht only in that the use of all forms of found and field recording and micro sounds become grist for the mill. Audio works have been a part of the artistic lexicon as far back as Schwitters, M Duchamp and Friedrich Jurgensen, to name just 3 of hundreds. We have appropriated the form known currently as electroacoustic improv. because it works for us like choosing a particular set of colours or palette to work within, but I view my work as painting using sounds instead of paint. I also produce long form tone poems such as my current release on infrequency.org "war of the welles" these are all an important part of my practice.”

So perhaps the Fluxus connection is fairly tenuous. Never mind. Writing this has been an interesting exercise and I’ve learned a few things about sound art.

Fluxus itself survived the death of George Maciunas in 1978 albeit in somewhat diluted form. It has since adapted itself to the internet and the best info I’ve been able to find on current activities is here 
 http://www.fluxus.org/FLUXLIST/faq.htm

1] For more information see Women in Fluxus,  http://www.theawl.com/2010/09/you-can-put-your-top-back-on-now-rediscovering-the-women-of-fluxus-at-moma

2] http://www.belkin.ubc.ca/satellite/what-sound-what-silence

3] From an interview with Robert Amos in the Times Colonist. April 2^nd. 2011

4] Deborah Alanna exhibit-v.

5] http://www.drouinolsen.com/

6] www.jamiedrouin.com/performance.htmlhttp://www.jamiedrouin.com/performance.html

Jamie Drouin and Trudi Lynn Smith at Open Space

Conduit is an installation of light and sound by local artists Jamie Drouin and Trudi Lynn Smith. The opening reception is on Saturday, April 16 starting at 4:00 p.m. The exhibition will continue until April 30, 2011.
The visual component of Conduit is based on principles of the camera obscura, while the sound elements will be drawn from the pressure changes from the weather outside the gallery and shifting of the building itself. Drouin and Smith take the sights and sounds that enter the gallery naturally and amplify them.

Slide Room Gallery - Sounds in a Room

This event of improvised new music by Lance Olsen and Jamie Drouin will be part of our Slide Room Café series.

Come hear the sounds.

Draw on the tables and wall.

Info on the artists Olsen and Drouin

Pulse Interval at Open Space

Pulse Interval
Farheen Haq (Victoria), Azin Seraj (Oakland), Andrew Forster (Montreal) and Jamie Drouin (Victoria)
Opening Friday, July 23 at 7:30 pm
Artist Talk Saturday, July 24 at 2:00 pm
Pulse Interval examines how we mobilize habits of movement, images and data to navigate geographic, psychosocial and political locales. Three visual artists, Farheen Haq, Azin Seraj and Andrew Forster and the sound artist Jamie Drouin, each alludes to embodiment and repeated movements to map an interiorized here. Each artist, whether casually or formally, invokes choreography as part of his or her work. Farheen Haq’s lyrical Endless Tether presents the beauty and constriction of clothing in a panoramic sequence. Andrew Forster bases Duet on a media clip of defusing a teenaged suicide bomber. Azin Seraj, artist in residence July 10 to 29, will present her screening at street level. Her work contact complicates the pleasures and ambiguities of the simple activity of meandering down the street. Jamie Drouin’s HUM transforms sound into a physical, bodily experience. Pulse Interval is a collaboration between MediaNet and Open Space, jointly curated by Catlin Lewis and Helen Marzolf.