Soundmarks

Presented by Fremantle Biennale

10:00am – 4:00pm

WA Shipwrecks Museum

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The equivalent of landmarks, soundmarks can define places through demarcation of space and all that exists with it. Because sound is ephemeral, our memory of it rarely endures long past its production. Composer Ryan Burge and visual artist Jenn Garland present a site-responsive soundscape installation that explores how sense of place is refracted through cultural memory and nostalgia. Together they abstract and reimagine soundmarks, objects and artefacts from the Fremantle area which embody the port city and evoke it’s past.

Located in the Shipwrecks Museum’s Storehouse Gallery within the former commissariat Building, the installation considers the function and context of the building over time. ‘Soundmarks’ blends authentic and alternate histories, acknowledging that both sound and memory always remain subjective representations of reality.

Ryan Burge is a composer and sound artist currently completing his Honours in Composition and music technology at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts. His recent works explore what we might call hyperreal soundscapes. Collages of sounds taken from the natural environment, archival records, musical samples, speech and composed material are subjected to studio processing, editing and abstraction to create sonorous palimpsest that investigate the intersection of nature and culture.

Jenn Garland’s practice borrows from the language and methods of science, by adopting a research approach to creating and questioning meaning. Fieldwork, physical experiments, and archival records are used in a quasi-scientific manner.

This reflects her background working as a researcher. Often site-specific, her work explores landscapes which bear the scars of industry and reveal the ‘myth of progress’. Here spaces that are temporary, obsolete, abandoned, derelict, liminal and infrastructural are exposed as sites of conflict over values and power.

Cost: Free
Location: Storehouse Gallery
Dates: Every Thursday - Sunday until 24 November
Time: 10am - 4pm

Please visit the Fremantle Biennale website for more information. 

Presenting Partners

WA Maritime Museum

 

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