Song For My Father
I modified a small accordion so that it only made the sound of breathing (or for a more recent reference, the bellows of a ventilator). I “played” that accordion, breathing for my father, for a 5 hour uninterrupted period at Deluge Contemporary Art here in Victoria. The act of doing it, a meditation, a contemplation, a ritual, helped me make peace with my memory of that past relationship and with my Dad’s death. I installed a player for the performance video and a set of speakers in the drawers of a steel tool chest that my father had built for himself, and on its top-mounted a deconstructed video panel through which the video of my playing the breathing accordion can be seen. The video loops, the sound emerges from within his tool chest. I completed this work a few months before the current covid pandemic, but the breathing sound seems right for what we are going through now. Although Dad died long before covid, I think his death, after his long struggle to keep breathing, especially resonates today. The playing of the accordion is mechanical, but also human, the sound matched my own breathing as I played.
I modified a small accordion so that it only made the sound of breathing (or for a more recent reference, the bellows of a ventilator). I “played” that accordion, breathing for my father, for a 5 hour uninterrupted period at Deluge Contemporary Art here in Victoria. The act of doing it, a meditation, a contemplation, a ritual, helped me make peace with my memory of that past relationship and with my Dad’s death. I installed a player for the performance video and a set of speakers in the drawers of a steel tool chest that my father had built for himself, and on its top-mounted a deconstructed video panel through which the video of my playing the breathing accordion can be seen. The video loops, the sound emerges from within his tool chest. I completed this work a few months before the current covid pandemic, but the breathing sound seems right for what we are going through now. Although Dad died long before covid, I think his death, after his long struggle to keep breathing, especially resonates today. The playing of the accordion is mechanical, but also human, the sound matched my own breathing as I played.
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Daniel Laskarin
Daniel Laskarin is an artist and a professor at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Victoria. His practice is one of restless contemplation. It is object based, materially and philosophically rooted. It is an investigation of our experience of objects as other bodies and of the ways in which art may give sensory experience to consciousness, creating a bridge between substance and ineffability. Understanding that the "expanded field" is utterly blown apart, his work makes things that stay together, that find their own order in a condition of disorder, and that at the same time remain unsettled. This work uses diverse media, drawn from industrial materials and processes, sometimes incorporating photography and video, optics, robotics systems, installation and sound. He has been involved with set design, public image projections, and large scale public commissions in the Pacific Northwest and has exhibited across Canada and internationally. |
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