FOREST (for a thousand years...) | 2012; Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller; Installation view from dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel Germany
April 7 – June 30, 2018
SJMA is pleased to collaborate with the Institute of the Arts and Sciences of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Arts Division on its presentation at the university's Arboretum and Botanic Garden of: FOREST (for a thousand years...), the beguiling and uncanny audio installation by renowned Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.
FOREST (for a thousand years...) will be installed in the redwood grove of UC Santa Cruz's Arboretum and Botanic Garden. This will be the West Coast debut of the 28-minute sound installation, originally commissioned for dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, Germany.
To experience the piece, you follow a path through a densely forested redwood grove. Branches crunch under your feet until you reach a small clearing populated by tree stumps. As you sit down, the sounds of rustling trees, crackling branches, and bird calls subtly intensify. An airplane passes overhead. Someone laughs. It is nearly impossible to determine which sounds are coming from a recording and which sounds are live. When machine guns begin to fire and an explosion detonates, the eeriness of the experience becomes laced with quickly amplifying uneasiness. An indeterminate history merges with the present, filled with both horrors and the sublime, and becomes an audible presence in the shadowy forest.
About the Artists: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are internationally recognized artists known for their immersive multimedia sound installations and their audio and video walks. Their recent solo exhibitions include: 21st Century Museum, Kanazawa, Japan (2017); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (2015); Museo Nacional Centro de ArteReina Sofia, Madrid (2015); and The Menil Collection, Houston(2015). Recent group exhibitions include Being Modern: MoMA in Paris, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014); and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany. In 2011, Cardiff and Miller won Germany’s prestigious Kathe Kollwitz Prize. They also represented Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale, for which they received the Biennale's Premio Speciale (Special Prize) and the Benesse Prize.
Read more at the Institute for Arts and Sciences site.
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