Moon Rehearsal Tape, an immersive sound and video installation by Irene Bindi and Aston Coles, uses the exhibition space as both material and site for performance. An unconventional sound system built by Coles is a central tool for a series of performances, discussions and screenings. With each performance, the installation becomes a shifting network of moving parts.
The singularity of the sculpture is realized through its varying roles. The installation is composed in such a way as to coax unconventional performance from viewers and performers alike, making the artwork a complex matrix of possibility.
Coles’ hand-built sound system is made and unmade through a cycle of breakdown and repair performed by the artists and sculpture. Sites of recording and transmission are exchanged and transposed. By means of its regular maintenance, the sculpture becomes a rotating anatomy of speaker parts, altered and replaced. These acts of substitution recall the Greek myth of the ship the Argo, whose voyagers gradually replaced each piece of the ship during their voyage so they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form. The open system of repair taken up by Coles and Bindi fosters perpetually new relationships between the artists and their work. Its composition is its own school.
Throughout Moon Rehearsal Tape, video and audio recordings made by Bindi and Coles in the space will be used in conjunction with the sound system to analyze the processes of recording and reception. Disappearing into digital projection, the artists leave the work to perform itself. Through performance, recordings, and projections, Bindi and Coles explore the psycho-physical dynamics of sound and vision and the life of objects in alternatively framed states, complicating the static receivership of traditional music performance and cinema.
The exhibition conceived for Plug In ICA will further develop into a series of events, constituting a broad-ranging, multidisciplinary investigation of audio space and the variegated landscape of contemporary cinema, the gallery becoming a site in which practices and materials are worked through, analyzed, examined, displaced, transcribed, reformed, remediated, and reedited.
Irene Bindi lives in Winnipeg. Her collage, film, and sound works have appeared at venues across Canada and abroad. She is interested in the conceptual and material possibilities of alternative cinematic modes. Since 2008 she has also collaborated on sound projects with Aston Coles.
Aston Coles is an interdisciplinary artist in Winnipeg. His practice uses installation, sound and sculpture. His work isn’t about anything specifically. He works alone and collaboratively with Irene Bindi and performs solo noise as Single White Female.
Plug In ICA gratefully acknowledges the continued support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, and Winnipeg Arts Council as well as our generous donors, valued members and dedicated volunteers. We would like to announce the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for our 2016 / 2017 programming. Thank you all!