2009
sound sculpture with automation
Diane Landry, Canadian
This intricate web of turning lights and darks operates cyclically, as does the iron installation. Lights appear and disappear with the rotation of the wheels, and the number of the wheels-twelve-references both the hours of the clock and the months of the year. Sand pours down the bottles as though they were hourglasses. But if the windmills suggest human patterns of time, they also allude to perpetual motion machines and thus a different scale of measurement if not a state beyond temporality. Although actually run by electricity, the form of the assemblages, with the running sand acting as weights, evokes the overbalanced perpetual motion wheels (dating to the middle ages, by Bhaskara, Villard de Honnecourt, and others) that were designed, futilely, to rely on inertia to spin forever. On earth perpetual motion seems to be an impossible fantasy, though in space planets and stars spin for unfathomable spans of time without energy input. The tension between human time and eternity is thus condensed into these enigmatic wheels, as is that between human and cosmic scales: the viewer oscillates between recognizing the hand-held water bottle and seeing star systems in their arrangement.
In a number of earlier works, Landry has called attention to the threat to our most precious resource: clean water, which is conspicuously absent from the bottles here. Filled with sand, the bottles are dried up, sterile. In Quebec water is intimately linked to the question of energy, and thus the perpetual motion problem and fantasy. There are 237 bottles here, the liquid contents of which would apparently fill a bath-no more. The short-sightedness of human management of natural resources is made pitifully obvious by the work’s evocation of cosmic time, in comparison with which the human lifespan and even the existence of the species seem simply irrelevant. And there is something terrifying about this assemblage, which is so cold and serene, so unperturbed by the viewer’s presence. (Excerpt from the DVD-catalogue« Diane Landry, installations & performances 2008-2009 », text by Alison Syme, 2010, p.8-9. Commisioned work by L’Œil de Poisson )
Artist bio:
Diane Landry first completed her studies in natural sciences and worked 5 years in agriculture. At 25 years old, she decided to go back to school in the arts because she had realised it will be easier to change the world with visual arts. She received her BA in Visual Arts from Laval University, Quebec, in 1987 and an MFA from Stanford University, California in 2006. As a multidisciplinary artist, Diane Landry designs original performances, installations with automation, audio sculptures and works she qualifies as “mouvelles”. She has exhibited and performed extensively in Canada, USA, Europe, China and Australia. She received numerous awards for her works in Québec as well as in the United States. She was an artist in residence in many centres in Canada, USA, France, Italy and Argentina. In 2008, she completed a six-month stay at the Studio du Québec in New York, sponsored by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. In 2009, the Musée d’art de Joliette published a monograph for the first retrospective exhibition of her work, The Defibrillators.
