Installations in 2021

Port Sydney photographer and filmmaker Sandy McLennan has created a new interactive installation from workshops with students from the South River Public School. It can be experienced outside on the porch windows of the NAISA North Media Arts Centre (and inside the gallery when COVID health restrictions permit).

"A year goes by and cognizance changes: feeling negative and positive, screws coming loose. The photo and sound images displayed here and now give a chance to consider the time we’ve been through and the time we are in.

I started working with South River Public School Grade 7 students over a year ago – they built their own cardboard pinhole cameras and created black & white photo images in my portable darkroom. Then everything changed. Today we have photograms (camera-less images created in the darkroom), negatives exposed in cardboard pinhole cameras and contact prints (reverse images of the above) made by the students in March 2020 and sound and images created by myself just in time for this exhibition.
Looking at the window glass, you will see a reflection of South River going by: ongoing change where the present is behind you. Now change focus to see behind the glass: reach out and bring your hand close to the photos and the past comes alive with sound. You can almost touch it! Any photograph or audio recording is an image of the past and these merge with the present in a window to the world." - Sandy McLennan

New Adventures in Sound Art would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for supporting the workshop component of this presentation.

Somewhere between an electroacoustic instrument and architecture, Sounding Bodies: Eutopia, is a spatial audio installation that transforms sheet metal panels into inhabitable loudspeakers. Tremoring with sonic vitality, these everyday materials offer polyphonic reflections on the village of South River and surrounding area; fragments of speech taken from interviews with long-time residents and newcomers alike slowly orbit the installation, pondering the poignant cycles of change and the ineffable mystery of place. The title of the work was inspired by a phrase from one of the interviews: “it’s still a good place”, capturing the ambiguous etymological origins of ‘utopia’, which in addition to meaning ‘non-place’ can also be written with the prefix ‘eu’, meaning ‘good place’.

An outdoor picnic table provides the setting for listening on headphones to electroacoustic sound art works curated by NAISA from an international call for submissions on the theme Digital in Nature.

This interactive sculpture turns a Grow Room into a Fungi and Sprout music generator. Fine electrodes placed within roots of Endo (and some Ecto) mycorrhizal plants, receive bio-data and translate this activity into notes which trigger actuators that strike, strum and rattle creating a symbiotic symphony of sound!

WATER Shadows is an installation of sound sculptures that celebrates water, featuring field recordings of watery soundscapes in the artist’s community. As one moves through the ‘water temple’ complex of steel sculptures wrapped in discarded bicycle inner tubes, the unique sound ecology of each water-recording site is experienced as one continuous flow. Boundaries are dissolved as the raw recordings of both natural and machine-made sounds blend together.

Using Arduino micro-controllers and speakers inside the works, the voice of water is amplified, allowing it to speak for itself. In this way, WATER Shadows opens a dialogue that encourages the benign and beautiful symbiotic relationship between nature and society.

WATER Shadows in essence, is a sanctuary of sorts, a sculptural landscape in which to tune to the wild currents within ourselves and our world. Deep listening is encouraged here, as Hermann Hesse writes, “They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.”


"Water Shadows was inspired by an experience I had with the element water in the deep silence of winter." Below is a sketch and voice recording by the artist describing the inspiration behind WATER Shadows.

Julia White thanks everyone who participated in the WATER Shadows exhibition at NAISA by sharing their own personal reflections on water and why it was important to them. Unique to this exhibition at NAISA, sonic water offerings were being gathered - the recording device on the water obelisk (of the installation) is the gathering vessel, ready to receive your contributions!

Guests and online contributors were asked to name a watery place that is special to you, sound it out, sing it, tell a story, recount a dream, offer an idea or a poem. Each one was collected as an essential part of the exhibit, digitally archived and made available online in the Web Water Portal: http://www.juliawhite.ca/water-shadows-south-river