: performance in Singapore; call out for participants for singapore premiere
Voyeurages (voyeur/ voyage) is a work that speaks about our contemporary concepts of journey and visitation.We travel amongst cities and even our own towns without really being part of them, without truly communicating within them. Unless one is able to get close to real people and experiences true to a location, we are nothing more than voyeurs. We have lost our sense of voyage, when we visit a city we barely touch the surface of its culture or personality- all the airports look the same, chain stores appear in every country - it is increasingly difficult for us to find the real essence of a place.
Seeing these slow moving and quiet information ON people themselves, and hearing it OUT of them is a strangely unsettling experience as it still leaves the audience at a distance. They will need to get physically close to these individual participants to hear cleary, but few will, as they feel confronted by the naked torso; a feeling not unlike the confrontation of an unknown custom. The story tellers are static as their sounds whisper out of them, and their images slowly wash over them: they are physically part of them yet they are some how involuntary, unfeeling messengers.
The work leaves us to ponder the way we relate to each other in the different places we find ourselves - in a world where speed is everything; taking away the inbetweens.
Voyeurages was premiered as a commissioned work for the National Review of Live Art, Midland Railway Workshops, Western Australia in April 2005.
Make sure you see the video of this work on the video page.
Review:
"Bodies, sounds, sensations and visions all come together in a challenging
critique of contemporary travel which is simultaneously imbued with those
almost ecstatic states of self revelation, reflection and political
awareness" - Jonathan Marshall, Catalogue Essay May 2006
"Cat Hope's Voyeurgers (Australia) is a stunning contemporary audio visual
investigation into the journey."-Rosie Denis, Realtime Magazine, Vol. 67, 2005
THE OTHER VELVET
This is a scored work for musician and dancer. The score is stitched inside a large, opulent silk velvet skirt that is worn by the musician. The work relies on theatrical suspension of disbeleif...the dancer is not obviously under the skirt until sometime later in the work.
The work was developed out of a larger music and dance collaboration, THE VELVET PALACE, concieved in 1998. THE OTHER VELVET was premiered at the Putting On An Act performance festival, at the Perth Insitute of Contemporary Art in 1999, and is now one of Cat Hope's most performed works.
see photos and video on this site.
PLUG
PLUG is a scalp of speaker hair, where scores of small ear pod headphones make up the hair strands of a neatly styled head of hair, each strand emitting a sound at its end. Like a stand of hair, which takes a month to grow a centimetre, each of these pods has a story of its own, growing out of a central "head" of connected to a bank of hair sounds via a spinal chord of cable. There are interesting physical similarities between hair strands and audio cable; both materials that translate information over time - sound/data in cable and colour/condition in hair. Hair plug is a term used by the hair restoration industry for new strands of hair (sometimes in clumps of up to 50) inserted into the scalp. A plug-in is also a software add on to a program, and a plug is a general "stopper".
This piece uses ratio's similar that that of hair on the human head...where an average person will have around 150 hairs per sq cm.
The work is an installation but also a performance. At the opening and intermittent times throughout the exhibition different hairdressers come and 'style' the work, creating a moving sound scape and a new static scape until the next styling.
The work is the 2nd in a tryptic of works by Cat Hope using hair as a central theme. The first was a performance piece entitled UNRAVELLED where worms are removed from a womans' hair, their activity recorded and re presented as part of the performance.
It was premiered at the "you are here...entangle" sound exhibition at the Moores Building, Fremantle WA as part of the 2006 Totally Huge New Music Festival.
Review
"...visually arresting is Cat Hope's Plug. A wig head block is mounted on a plinth, with tresses spilling down, some tortured into hair curlers; however these ebony locks are not made of hair but of everyday ear bud headphones and wires. Emanating from these tiny speakers is a 16 channel soundscape drawn from samples of haircutting--snipping and shearing. It is subtle--people assume they must listen to individual headphones, however the effect is made from the overall trebly soundscape emanating from the mass of tiny speakers, shifting across the web of tangles. Wonderful." Gail Preist "Totally Huge: Knots and flames", Realtime Magazine, ed. 70
PICKPOCKET
Pickpocket is a sound installation that plays with our concepts of seeing and hearing. The work is a large 2 x 1.5m gilt frame which contains 40 consumer flash disc digital voice recorders with built in speakers which record and play back sound events of the visitors who come to "see" the work. The recorders use voice activated recording technology and allot the recordings into 4 separate folders in the flash disc. The sounds are mapped inside the frame in 5 groups of 8, and so travel in directions giving the listener/observer the sense that they can see the sound move about in the frame. The recorders are set in grey foam usually used for packing artworks, and the piece aims to challenge our relationship to framed artworks and of sound to image.
The piece was commissioned as part of research project for the Biennale Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) in 2004 and first exhibited at the John Curtin Gallery at Curtin University in Western Australia as part of the Perth International Arts Festival in 2005.
UNRAVELLED
UNRAVELLED is a performance work that uses video to give a closer insight to the action. the performer has a wig that is full of worms, the performance is the gradual unravelling and detangling of these worms from the hair. The worms are placed on a bowl, that is videoed from beneath by a hidden camera, and this image is projected onto the performers back. The work has a score of worm activity underground.
The work is inspired by the stories of women in 1950's rural Australia, who often sported beehive hairdo's despite the rare visits to the hairdressers, often in towns hundreds of kilometers away. As a result, the lack of combing and preservation involved in maintaing this hair led to it becoming a home to insects, as many a haridresser from rural hairdressers will testify. The work is also inspired by the urban myths of spiders in dreadlock hair and similar stories.
The work was premiered as part of the performance season Tic(k), at The Blue Room Theatre in Perth, Western Australia, October 2003. It was later shown at the National Review of Live Art Midland that same year.
Make sure you see the video of this work on the video page.
DRIVE
Drive is a collaborative installatin made with K Ford. It features pickled kangaroo skin stretched out accross a subwoofer speaker, that plays a slowed down car accident recording. The low frequency vibrate the skin (kept soft by regular moisturising).
The work was premiered as part of the PEEP-IN DEATH exhibition as part of Artrage 2002. It was operated using a coin slot mechanism.
Please see photos and video on this site.
D.A.C.S (Digital Audio Control Skirt)
This is a garment to be worn by a musician, it is a projection screen in the shape of a skirt. it also contains apparatus to control audio and video from the wearer.
The work was funded by the Perth Insitute Of Contemporary Arts Research and Develpoment Fund. It has been shown at ISEA, BEAP and a variety of other festivals and shows worldwide.
The project is currently on hold pending more research.
please see the images and video on this site.
