Jean-Pierre Aubé
SAVE THE WAVES
Jean-Pierre Aubé’s Save the Waves is an impressive installation where the artist sonifies the flow of the electromagnetic force, an usually imperceptible phenomenon.
Since 2000, Aubé constructs Very Low Frequency receivers. Similar to radio receivers, they allow him to monitor the fluctuations of the magnetic field of the earth and to hear the sound of natural phenomena’s like the auroras borealis and the lightning.
View of the exhibit
credits: Guy L'Heureux
For VLF-Natural Radio (2000-2003) Aubé traveled to isolated places, among them, an island in the middle of the Saint-Lawrence River, a lake in the Finnish Lapland and the shore of Loch Ness in Scotland. Because VLF signals are altered by the presence of power lines, these experiments had to take place far from the urban environment. The installation at the Darling Foundry reverses the process of Natural Radio and amplifies the electrical Humm.
60 hrz
Summer long, the huge transformer of Hydro-Québec, next to the Foundry, will be under close monitoring. The transformer generates a 60 cycle per second humm, the official wavelength of the American power grid. This is the sound of electricity, the contemporary soundtrack of our domestic life. Four VLF antennas implanted in the gallery will capture it.
The sounds grabbed by the antenna’s array are put in a 24-driver horn speaker system. Specially designed for the acoustic of the Darling Foundry, the 4 channel sound system reproduces an immersive soundscape, where the electromagnetic vibrations are the source.
Jean-Pierre Aubé works in Montreal and received a Masters in Visual Arts at UQAM (1998). In 1999, he exhibited at Dare-Dare and in 2002 presented a highly acclaimed project on the VLF in Paris and Helsinki. The following year (2003), he held an exhibition in Mexico and he also gave a performance within the setting of the New Cinema Festival. Along with his upcoming exhibit at the Darling Foundry this year, he participated in the 11th Biennale of Pancevo, Serbia. This autumn, he will present a solo show at Centre d’art Passerelle in Brest (France). www.kloud.org
The Art of Landscape Landscape is the concretisation of our natural surroundings; it is the product of the urban viewpoint applied to terrain, it is the area that delimits the space that humans inhabit. As Montaigne said, landscape is the result of an "artialisation" of nature, with the aim of altering, transforming, and beautifying it. First appearing in the 15th century the landscape genre evolved within the aesthetic transformation of our rapport with the world. It is within this artistic framework, where it is via landscape that we see nature, that the meaning of Jean-Pierre Aubé's work lies. He is investigating the origins of landscape by returning to the source and essential principals of art.
Sédimentation + paysage pointilliste II
details: filters, aquarium & gold fish
In an earlier exhibition, Aubé had presented a photograph that recalled an experience he had in August 1997, which put into practice the thoughts of Antiphon, cited by Aristotle, concerning the origin of art. To take the photograph, Aubé kayaked to a small island named Patience, situated near the île aux Grues in the St-Lawrence river. He dug a hole in the island's soil, and imbedded in the ground a toy wooden bed as a means of verifying whether a fabricated object could engender another. In effect, what gulf lies between art and nature? Who has defined art so that one bed cannot create another bed? The installation Sédimentation + paysage pointilliste II/Sediment and pointillist landscape II pursues in another way, and another context, this same rupture. This time, the voyage was sedentary, taking place in Montreal. Though this city is also situated on an island, it is within an urban landscape, and not in a natural site, that this artistic action had to encounter its new element of choice: water. Why water? It is what history demands: the water of the St-Pierre river and its riverbed. The water from this unseen river has never actually disappeared: it has been sullied and now burried. Montreal was originally established within the confines of the St-Lawrence and St-Pierre rivers. Il was there that the first colonists arranged their territory, delimiting the new areas of "landscape". With time, the process of urbanisation begotten by instustrial development radically transformed the St-Pierre river into a subterranean canal for sewage water. For the duration of his exhibition, Aubé attempted to resurrect this neglected waterway, to manifest its absence by the production of a landscape, a scene. To achieve this, he conceived an exhumation strategy by which water from the river would be brought forth into view, creating his installation. After having identified two sites from which to recover water, Aubé extracted an amount necessary to create the site-specific installation to the gallery, located in approximately the same area as the St-Pierre river. In the Quartier Ephémère gallery, an electric pump would conduct the contaminated water into a plastic barrel. Passing through this barrel, the water flowed through two transparent acrylic tubes filled with filtration sand, and then through four polystyrene and carbon filters. After these two obligatory steps, the water transversed a copper pipe and into a six feet aquarium filled with live gold fishes.
Sédimentation + paysage pointilliste II
2400 l. d’eau, filtres, pompes, aquarium et poissons rouges, photographies
In the vast exploration of landscape that has accompanied urban development from painting to photography, the experience of place that Aubé works with approaches that of Land Art. However, generally, with Land Art, the only real adventure is that which occurs on the natural site. Site-specific work is only recalled through visual documentation. In this way, using the gallery as exhibition site becomes an off-site, and the visitor a passive witness of a past action. In the hydraulic installation presented by Aubé, the production shared in visu the result of a process of purification, the artist is referring equally to the work done in situ of the sort that this history of water suggests a double topography that, inevitably, accentuates the memory of that which escapes our view, the point of view. More than being uniquely an exhibition site, the gallery became, for the circumstances, a site of passage, of recycling, that suggests that the natural site has never disappeared.
While this evocation refers to the origins of landscape, the installation has nothing to see with the problem of the absent terrain, the nostalgia of a country as real as nature; even less with an ecological engagement. Outside of a legitimate concern for the environment, the question posed by this history pertains specifically to landscape; to the landscape that immediately digs a divide between nature and art. A divide that the theory of imitation has tried for centuries to mask but has always been discovered by the work of art, and notably that of landscape. Inspired sometimes by nature, the work of art has first of all the desire to be open to an enigma, that of an absent origin, anchored by a landscape that is never underground. In this way, from a hole dug in an island to the exercice of pumping water while appealling to a now-legendary river, a singular history: that of a bed that will never be able to give birth to another bed.
André-L. Paré