Lost in the Memory Palace | The Dark Pool
Yet, as viewers move through the installation, they activate acoustic components of the work—the silence of the space is broken by strands of music, echoes of stories and fragments of dialogue. These cadences are as bodiless as the space; they hauntingly recall a past that is possibly fictional, but conceivably true. Different voices speak of their experience and offer possible explanations. Their fractured accounts and tangential conversations circulate around the narrative of the "Dark Pool," an enigmatic abyss of water, a fictional place that has become a part of folklore and shared memory. to the work's examination of the relationship between fact and fiction and of the impossibility of their resolution within memory. Our experience of the sounds recalls how memory can be both an evocation of past events and a confusion of subconscious associations. In the Babel of information, knowledge is potentially infinite, yet memory fully determined. The telling of stories is in conflict with the value and functional intention of information. The seemingly obsessive accumulation of books, their confusion and multiplicity, becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of ever being able to assimilate the endlessness of data. Yet, the links of each sound—each reference—to our individual memories, is akin to a revelation of the miraculous, of meaning that is unattainable through rational analysis. Over time, the story continues to hold its evocative power as it claims a new place in the memory of each listener, becoming one more subconscious association—a new fiction that holds its own truth. When the creator of the laboratory, the library or the story is gone, their representation of the reality which they have A well-traveled trunk sits diagonally across the edge of a table. Its lid is open and airline tags hang from its handle. Inside is a miniature diorama of the Dark Pool in its early days, before anyone but the locals knew about it. A few cars sit in the makeshift parking lot. Someone has strung a string of lights across the gorge to illuminate its shiny, black surface.Despite a seeming irresolution of meaning, of apparently discontinuous voices, each tale is related on the axis of the narrative thread. Although appearing illogical and atemporal, every account contributes to a larger narrative, Catherine Crowston, The Dark Pool, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff, Alberta, 1995 (brochure).