Trace Response
Carole Sawyer (Voice) with John Oliver (Guitar accompaniment)
May 26, 2018
Single Performance - Sold Out
In-Gallery

We are delighted to announce the fifth in an ongoing series of experimental, performative exhibition responses that take place in the gallery. Carol Sawyer and John Oliver take on TRACE. Using experimental voice, accompanied by electric guitar and an oscilloscope, Carol will perform in Modulateur-Démodulateur by Arnauld Colcomb and Bertrand Planes (Paris). She is accompanied by musician and composer, John Oliver. This performance is also part of Drone Day, organized by the Arts Council of New Westminster. “For too long the drone has been overshadowed by the tyrants of melody & rhythm.”

“We are dazzled by her inventiveness, ambition, and humour.”
Georgia Straight

Sawyer is a Vancouver-based visual artist and singer working predominately with photography, video, installation, and improvised music, Since the early 1990s her work has been concerned with the connections between photography and fiction, performance, memory and history. Her ongoing project The Natalie Brettschneider Archive was shown recently at the Vancouver Art Gallery, curated by Bruce Grenville. Earlier iterations of this show were held at Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, with curator Michelle Jacques, and at Carleton University Art Gallery, with curator Heather Anderson. This exhibition will be shown at the Windsor Art Gallery in 2019, where it is being curated by Jaclyn Meloche, and a monograph on the Brettschneider Archive will be launched at this exhibition. Sawyer’s new video The Scholar’s Study will be exhibited at the Gordon Smith Gallery this summer as part of the exhibition Visitations (Or, Thirteen Ways to Live with Ghosts), curated by Kimberly Phillips. Sawyer was awarded the 2017 Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography by the Canada Council for the Arts.

John Oliver is a Canadian composer, guitarist, and conductor. An associate of the Canadian Music Centre and a member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community, his music has been performed throughout North America, Europe, and China. In a 1989 article in The Music Scene, Oliver stated that he intended his music “to make sense without falling back on traditional models”