Through the spring, summer, and fall, the music of the large, shallow body of water that is Lake Nipissing on the city of North Bay's western shores is unmistakable and unceasing: a loud hiss of water moving in response to wind that, if you listen carefully and hard, is actually quite aurally complex. And, of course, very beautiful. In the winter, though, it's another thing. The music of the movement of water is temporarily stilled by its crystallization into a thick mantle of ice. So how do you make a frozen lake sing? Well, you ask Gordon Monahan to have a go at it. He's the featured artist in the 2014 incarnation of Ice Follies, a biennial exhibition held out on the frozen, windswept surface of Lake Nipissing.
Gordon Monahan, Piano on Frozen Lake Nipissing, 2014, mixed media
"Windswept" is important, for Monahan's installation, Piano on Frozen Lake Nipissing, has a crucial Aeolian component, dependent on the ceaseless movement of air across icy expanse to create music. Atop a wooden platform raised a metre or so above the snow and ice of the lake, Monahan has set the signature of his installation work: a battered old upright piano. Some many metres away sits a tiny old camper trailer. The long piano wires that run between the two – between the piano's soundboard and the trailer terminus – are of aesthetic consequence, for they respond both to the wind that blows across them (that Aeolian thing) as well as the vibrating coils attached to the trailer end that feed Monahan's deconstructed recordings of piano works by Chopin and Henry Cowell into them.
From a distance you can't see the wires spanning the traverse between piano platform and trailer, but you can hear them: they produce a long, sustained drone. Up close, with the piano wires visually evident and with some careful listening, what at first seems sonically singular is in fact myriad. The ear is a discerning device, given the chance, and the seemingly monolithic wall of sound can be aurally untangled into its component threads. It's a complex amalgam dominated by the aleatoric, wind-driven music of the lake subtly underscored by what is recognizably artefactual: the compositional stuff.
This is how you get a lake to sing again.
Ice Follies: http://icefollies.ca/
Ice Follies 2014 continues until March 5.
Gil McElroy is a poet, artist, independent curator, and freelance art critic. He is the author of Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art, four books of poetry, and Cold Comfort: Growing Up Cold War. McElroy lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather. He is Akimblog's roving Ontario correspondent and can be followed @GilMcElroy on Twitter.
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Gordon Monahan at the Ice Follies in North Bay
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