Jaki Irvine: Five lines of song-smoke: Opening Thursday, November 19, 6-8pm

Frith Street Gallery is delighted to announce our next exhibition, a new multi-channel video work by Jaki Irvine titled Five lines of song-smoke.

Irvine uses video, installation, photography, music composition and writing to explore the complex ways we imagine ourselves and the world around us, a process which for her has both philosophical and political implications.

Over the past few years, the artist has been inviting musicians to collaborate, respond and improvise to a series of shifting audio-visual elements using a moving graphic score which has been filmed, recorded and generated by her. Five lines of song-smoke takes as a starting point the small details of ordinary occurrences in Irvine's immediate home environment (a stone thrown into an icy pond; string hanging in a neighbour’s garden; a heavily plastered ceiling). The installation then expands on these with further imagery which grows from the musicians’ unique responses.

Other elements are partly informed by ‘Show me the Way to Go Home’ (1925), a song which for Irvine, represents whistling in the dark in the face of imminent crisis. Most memorably, it is sung in Jaws (1973), just before the shark attacks. The invited musicians were asked not to replicate the song, but to 'play in its shadow'.

The resulting installation draws on previous performances and rehearsal sessions by the artist; here nothing is permanent and is fixed only for a moment in time. Images grounded in sound are simultaneously precise and hallucinatory – they communicate both holding on and letting go and are shot through with glimmers of hope and despair, intimacy and a sense of being overwhelmed.
 
Musicians:

Izumi Kimura (piano)
Joe O’Farrell (flute)
Sarah Grimes (drums)
Marco Colonna (bass clarinet)
 
Phil Robson (guitar)
Tara Franks (cello)
Cath Roberts (saxophone)

Download press release