Outskirts

Owens Art Gallery, New Brunswick, October 2003

Outskirts was an installation with 6 audiotapes and a 4-hour continuous daily performance.

Outskirts examined relationships between the borders that are established between rural and urban districts. The piece was a magnification of that border with representations of metaphorical scenes that enacted abrasions, collisions, and distortions that occur at that intersection.

The audience entered the installation space and triggered a group of 9 horses that would jump up startled from the security guard’s table. An audiotape would begin with the sounds of them sniffing to determine who was entering. The room was divided into two parts by a black road; one side was a strip of undeveloped land on the edge of a new subdivision. Throughout the space motorized discarded cans ran up to the wall hitting it and back again repeatedly. There were trees made of building materials that were throwing cigarette butts out of the forest. There was a battery-operated car, which was traveling continuously up and down the road. The performer was being dragged back and forth by the car and she held on to the bumper and tried to steer it and keep it from hitting anyone who was crossing the road to the subdivision where there were 4 houses. When the door of each house was opened an audiotape came on and a motorized object would perform. Each house contained an enactment of an imagined interaction of a rift between nature or animals and the domestic environment.

Technical assistance: Peter Flemming, Graeme Patterson
Vocalists: Lorne Altman, Kathy Kennedy, Helen Pridmore, Linda Rae Dornan