CORNELIA PARKER

DOUBTFUL SOUND

• organisation

  BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art

• venue

  BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art

• date

  19 June 2010 to 19 September 2010

• preview

• address

  Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead, NE8 3BA

• directions

• times

  Open Daily 10.00-18.00

• admission

  FREE

• programme

  other events by this organisation

• description

  Parker’s compelling transformations of familiar, everyday objects investigate the nature of matter, test physical properties and play on private and public meaning and value. Using materials that have a history loaded with association, a feather from Sigmund Freud’s pillow for example, Parker has employed numerous methods of exploration – suspending, exploding, crushing, stretching objects and even language through her titles – transporting them to a realm between two states.
  
  A highlight of the exhibition will be Parker’s Perpetual Canon 2004. Shown in the UK for the first time, the installation consists of 60 silver-plated instruments from a marching band that have been squashed and suspended in midair. The title of the work is a musical term to describing a ‘round’, the repetition of a phrase again and again. The instruments robbed of their third dimension have a cartoon like quality, appearing as if they have inhaled, but not exhaled, a catastrophe frozen and forever silenced. Lit from the light of a single bulb, a cacophony of shadows replace the sound, both amplifying and containing the instruments, the shadows of the viewers replacing the absent players.
  

• location

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