Christian Marclay is a visual artist and musician whose practice explores the relations between sound and image in the visual arts. His work has played with vernacular and illustrative representations of music while also investigating more abstract ways to align “the visual" with sound. By using records as his “musical instruments," creating posters of blank sheet music, producing soundless records, and exhibiting an endless array of empty instrument cases, Marclay shifts our expectation of what we should be looking at and listening to.
Cinema will be Marclay's first solo exhibition in Canada. It brings together an important strand of his work for the first time, works that use cinematic sound as a primary element. The exhibition will consist of three recent pieces, the audio work Soundtrack to an Exhibition (1993) and two single-channel videos Telephones (1995) and Up and Out (1998). For Up and Out, the artist imposes the sound of one film onto another, creating a peculiar remix of both. As is the conceptual basis of Marclay's art practice, Cinema pays equal attention to our perceptions of sound and visual representation.
Marclay's sculptures and installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. In 1995, he was the Swiss representative at the Venice Biennale. He has had solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; the Musée d'art et d'art et d'histoire, Geneva; the Kunsthaus, Zurich and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He has also held musical performances throughout Europe, Japan, Canada, and the United States and in New York City where he lives. In addition to recording his own compositions, he has collaborated with many composers and musicians, such as Elliott Sharp, John Zorn, Butch Morris, Zeena Parkins, Christian Wolff, Ikue Mori, Günter Müller, the Kronos Quartet and Sonic Youth, among many others
Curated by Ben Portis
