Janet Cardiff - A Survey of Works including collaborations with George Bures Miller

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works including collaborations with George Bures Miller, the first mid-career survey of the Canadian artist's artwork. The exhibition includes a selection of the artist's most significant installations as well as a survey of her "Walks." Curated by P.S.1 Senior Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the show brings together all of Cardiff's major installations, including To Touch (1993), The Dark Pool (1995), Playhouse (1997), The Muriel Lake Incident (1999), and Forty-Part Motet (2001), and is the first and most comprehensive survey of Cardiff's work to date.

Cardiff (b. 1957) has gained international recognition for her audio and video "Walks" in which visitors, while listening to a CD walkman or watching the screen of a camcorder, follow the artist's directions through a site and become involved in the stories embedded in Cardiff's recorded instructions and suggestions. Voices, footsteps, music, sounds of cars, and gunshots make up a fictional soundtrack to an actual walk through real indoor and outdoor spaces. Cardiff's works involve the conventions of cinema and science fiction and explore the complexity of subjectivity in today's highly technological world, where the distinction between sensation and imagination continuously collapses. In Cardiff's "Walks," characters narrate dream-like recollections of particular events and refer to the participant's physical surroundings. Shifting between past and present, memory and reality, Cardiff's stories become a manipulation of the "real" and of a participant's projections, fantasies, and desires. This survey will present documentation of Cardiff's most significant "Walks" in a unique and innovative way.

Janet Cardiff
A Survey of Works including collaborations with George Bures Miller
Kurator: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev