Carol Sawyer: I attempt from love’s sickness to fly, in vain

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Carol Sawyer, "I attempt from love's sickness to fly, in vain," 2016

HD video still

Opening reception: Saturday,  April 22, 2 – 4 PM

"I attempt from love’s sickness to fly, in vain," is an exhibition of video and photographs based on a performance of an aria written by the English baroque composer Henry Purcell. The work explores a number of seemingly opposite concepts: theatricality/realism, period/ contemporary, fragment/ whole, youth/ age, health/ sickness, etc.

The video is set in a large ballroom with a proscenium arch stage at one end. A costumed, bewigged singer and viola di gamba player perform the aria, dance, rest, and perform the aria again - caught in a repeating loop complicated by the arias da capo structure, which could theoretically cycle endlessly.

The visual language used to construct the video builds on the textual, musical, emotional, and metaphorical complexity of the aria and performance. Multiple channels of video are combined to make one panoramic image, resulting in distortions and repetitions in the architectural space, which contribute to a sense that both the physical and metaphorical spaces described are shifting and unstable.

The artist gratefully acknowledges the British Columbia Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and Richard Metzger at Inspired Cinema for their support of this project.

Carol Sawyer is an artist, performer and singer working primarily with photography, installation, video, and improvised music. Since the early 1990’s her work has been concerned with the connections between lens-based media and fiction, performance, memory, and history. Sawyer’s project The Natalie Brettschneider Archive was exhibited in 2016 at Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Sawyer holds a Diploma with Honours in Photography from Emily Carr College of Art and Design (now ECU) and an MFA from Simon Fraser University.