Performance

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the North American premiere of Janice Kerbel’s Turner Prize nominated DOUG, a musical composition and performance.

Employing recognizable conventions from a variety of disciplines – from theatre to sport to music – Kerbel’s practice utilizes existing structures while challenging expectations and traditional use. Events normally considered impossible to depict are given form that is both surprising and strangely familiar.

Commissioned by The Common Guild, Glasgow and first presented at the Mitchell Library in 2014, an ensemble of six vocalists leads the audience through a nine song cycle of imagined disasters, translating “accident” into musical form. Reflecting the acts themselves, some pieces are violently short, others unfold at length. Voice and the structures inherent in music are used to give shape to these visceral moments, while Kerbel’s lyrics take the form of a series of rhythmic verse outlining a sequence of events going from bad to worse with titles such as Blast, Fall, Hit, Crash and Slip.

The performance is presented with musica intima and supported by Vancouver New Music. Text by Janice Kerbel. Composition by Janice Kerbel in collaboration with Laurie Bamon and Philip Venables. DOUG was initially conceived as an online project for Film and Video Umbrella.

Biography

Janice Kerbel lives and works in London, has exhibited internationally since the late 1990s and participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennales. Recent projects include The Turner Prize, Tramway, Glasgow; Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver (2015); DOUG, Common Guild, Glasgow (2014); Kill the Workers, Chisenhale, London; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe and Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre (2011); See it Now, Art Now, Tate Britain (2010); Remarkable, commissioned for Frieze Projects (2007); and Nick Silver Can’t Sleep, commissioned by Artangel/BBC Radio 3 (2006) and presented live at Art Now Live, Tate Britain (2007). Kerbel is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, greengrassi, London; Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg; and i8, Reykjavik.