Janet Cardiff
Janet Cardiff is an installation artist based in Canada and also lives in Germany with her husband, and collaborator, George Bures. They’re best known for their multi-media installations that involve the use of audio to submerge the audience in narrative and acoustic environments that are meant to tell a story and transport the audience across time.
Her art isn’t limited to audio though. Of all the installations I found online, it was hard to fully appreciate the audio installations. To me, they are very experiential, and hard to fully appreciate without being present. I appreciated the more visual installations, such as The Secret Hotel. It’s modeled after an old hotel. The audience follows a hall, then up some stairs. They’re then perched above a model of the hotel rooms, which are at an exaggerated perspective to appear life sized.
In another installation, called Paradise Institute, she models two rows of an old-fashioned red-carpeted movie theater. The audience enters a forced perspective model of the entire theater. Then they watch a film, and also watch and listen the installations audience. In this piece, audio is a large part of the transportation of place and time. In both of these installations the artist was successful in providing a sense of surprise, wonder, and altered perspective to the audience.
