Charles Stankievech

Constellations, sound installation, 2008
From March 20 to June 1, 2008

 

So it was by the stars you charted your course, asked the Phoenicians?
No, said Menippus, it is among the stars themselves I travel. 

Obsessed with the last groove of the record, Constellations evolves out of the manufactured silence of the recording medium. Dust particles, the grain of the shellac, and the trace of the cutting stylus uncover the foundation for a sound installation that ironically explores the extreme ends of noise: from the delicate to the visceral, from sound clusters to deep resonant tones.  Custom software routes, processes and modulates the record loops into a field of textures distributed overhead via a canopy of over a hundred micro-speakers and through the gallery floor by means of subwoofers. 

Artist and author Charles Stankievech works in the constellation of art, architecture and sound. Recently, his work was presented in Leonardo (MIT Press), Xth Biennale of Architecture (Venice), Banff Centre for the Arts, Subtle Technologies (Toronto), Eyebeam (New York), and the Planetary Collegium (England). Stankievech holds a Master’s degree in Studio Arts from Concordia University and a Bachelor of Arts (Honors) in English and Philosophy; He splits his time between Montreal and Dawson City, where he is currently starting the KIAC School of Visual Arts.

photos : Guy L'heureux

A colour, a sound, a substance, a pain, or a star
-Meredith Carruthers

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread.
Shelley

Constellations is part of a series of projects by Charles Stankievech that began in 2005 with Timbral, his graduate thesis show, and continued with Aletheia’s Veil and Horror vacui. These projects, which represent Stankievech’s efforts to articulate the intangible are airily physical: Timbral is made up of hollow textile forms, Aletheia’s Veil is a shimmer of light projected on silk, Horror vacui is thin glass. Their titles skim the void, refer to absence as defined by philosophy, mythology and physics. The works echo the Möbius strip as physical things that are both inside and outside, tricks modulations of space and light that upset our patterns of perception and question the assumptions that allow us to make our way through life. "Lift not the painted veil," Shelley warns, but Stankievech heeds him not, pursuing the shadowy world of the unknown and the unfurling edges of the sublime.

"Philosophy starts with disappointment," Charles Stankievech said in a recent conversation. "It is typically when things break down that we feel the need to analyze and take them apart. Unfortunately, this makes philosophy ultimately a melancholic practice—albeit an essential practice, and one that can be enjoyable on a certain level, but disheartening on another if left in a vacuum." Having first studied philosophy, Stankievech shifted his attention to the plastic arts out of a desire to operate on a material level with logic and reasoning and perhaps to infuse the melancholic with a little beauty. In the 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou, Jean-François Lyotard anticipated a new wave of philosopher-exhibition makers that would respond with an increased sensitivity to a dematerialized sense of reality. The press release for Les Immateriaux echoes Shelley in its reference to a “filter” or screen placed, "between us and things” 1. Whereas behind Shelley’s veil lurked fear, hope and the sightless chasm, the boundary described by Lyotard is permeated by, “realities that are in a new way tangible”, where “A colour, a sound, a substance, a pain, or a star return to us as digits in schemes of utmost precision”2.

Stankievech’s recent suite of projects recalls this tension between materiality and immateriality, the revealed and concealed in the contemporary world. These ideas are tangentially developed in his current installation at the Darling Foundry, Constellations. Constellations was inspired by Stargazing during an artist's residency in Trois-Pistoles, Quebec. Stargazing, an activity for solitary individuals, lovers and scientists, takes place under the night sky of lazy summers and through the telescopes of the observatory. The constellation Stankievech presents is of the amateur sky-watching variety. It offers a way of understanding the stars based on connections rather than measured distances. In the Darling Foundry hundreds of tiny speakers trailing from the gallery's ceiling create a canopy of sound. Broadcasting digital micro-sounds generated by ambient dust and record players, the speakers create a perceptual rendering of the cosmos that is not visual. In this way, the artist dares to undo the distant light of the stars, sounding out instead the space between them. Stankievech chooses the darkness of the starry night not as mute, invisible absence but as a resonating presence, like sparkling dust on the veil between the known and the unknown.

For Lyotard’s Immatériaux, the gaze into the void "allows the unrepresentable to be put forward as its missing contents.”3 Stankievech’s recent work grapples with the desire to both unveil and obscure, he ripples the veil to signal its presence. Bathed in the light of Aletheia’s veil, held in the vacuum bell jars of Horror Vacui, or rapt in the sonorous darkness of Constellations, Stankievech traps emptiness in a place where the ephemeral and the latent might be tempted to unfold. Testing the limits of our conceptuality, Stankievech throws forward a flashing beam of dust to show a path, the suggestion that the aesthetic experience of a summer’s grass-crushed stargazing might indeed offer some way to locate ourselves.

 

1. Jean. F. Lyotard, press release for Les Immatérieux, January 8, 1985.

2. Ibid.

3. J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Mancheter, Manchester University Press 1984, p. 81