Wavelength | Helena Ohman McCardle and Borja Alcalde

29th September – 14th October 2012

Gallery 3

Helena Öhman McCardle is a Swedish visual artist based in Glasgow and Stockholm. She has a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (1999 – 2004), with an exchange at the Environmental Art Department at Glasgow School of Art in 2002.

She works with video, sound and audio-visual installation, investigating theories of memory and perception. Central to recent video works has been the use of appropriated material, re-imagined into new contexts and narrative structures as a loose framework. Sound plays an important part in her work but has to date never been separated from the visual – the two media interact with one another to emphasise and discover new structures in the work.

Currently she is working on what will become a series of video and sound projects entitled Memory – a changeable and moving image, where the aim is to work in a more experimental manner than previously, particularly in relation to the structure and narrative technique of the work. The first project in this series, entitled Object, Reflection and Shadow is presented here at Market Gallery.

Gallery 2

Aural Data 1/4

Borja Alcalde works predominantly with sound, video and audio-visual installations, in order to experiment with aural memories, perception and contradictions. He enjoys the process of trial and error, and experimentation involved in using audio and video material. He feels this method provokes different reactions particularly whilst they interact with the various senses. His ideas for new work are often drawn from travelling, personal experiences or encounters with new spaces.

He is currently working on what will become a series of audio projects from four different countries: Morocco, Vietnam, Cuba and New York. The idea is to document the soundscape of these respective locations and the project will look to establish possible relationships between sonic environment, culture and human habit.

Aural Safari: The project is set out to capture a realistic sonic environment of Morocco, its culture and its people. This work is a living and breathing reference point, representing the sounds and experiences of one of North Africa’s most colorful countries. The fifteen- minute piece is a chronological representation of the sound experienced, over the three weeks of travelling.

Smells:

“Sound diffuses in all directions, like a gas […] Sounds spread and leaks like an odour, and it has the power to relieve and invigorate just as smells do. […] Sound is doubly extramural: in a disciplinary sense, it adds to art a dimension that has traditionally left to other, more temporal arts; secondly, in a more immediate or phenomenological sense, it introduces timely events into permanent, partitioned world of art” Steve Connor