Lost in the Memory Palace | The Dark Pool
The group of makeshift tables is completely covered by objects: books, photos, bare speakers, wire, light bulbs, pages from crumbling notebooks, rocks, a typewriter, a well-traveled trunk with a miniature scene inside. The viewer moves through the piece, triggering snippets of sound: an overheard conversation, a woman telling a story, a piano playing, unidentifiable noises, a portion of a movie soundtrack [...]This dark installation plays with its disjointed narrative, exploring how we construct our realities through fact and fantasy.In The Dark Pool we were trying to create a space that would give an audience the sense of anticipation and discovery felt when exploring an old attic or an abandoned house. We wanted to haunt the space with an invisible presence. We littered the room with traces of inexplicable activities and objects to provide clues as to whom might have lived there and what they had been doing.We hoped to create an environment that removed the viewer from the art gallery and transported them into another space and time so that they forgot where they were and why they had come. Maybe they had slipped through the back door into an abandoned warehouse, into a world where their slightest movement could stir up the dusty memories into sounds and stories that they could hear as they moved through the space.We wanted The Dark Pool to be a place where meaning is never constant, where one reality would blur into another, where maybe, the Wishing Machine sitting in the corner would actually work.JC 3 Excerpt from Anthony Hubermann ed., Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2001