Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: The Poetry Machine and Other Works

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present THE POETRY MACHINE & Other Works, by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, featuring the pair’s interactive tribute to a well-known poet. Made from a vintage organ, a collection of speakers and recordings of dozens of poems, The Poetry Machine allows viewers to hear and play the author’s voice and texts as a haunting musical instrument. The piece, says Janet Cardiff, “creates new connections through all of the poems,” and gives participants the ability “to create new poems out of his words.” The installation debuted in an exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal this winter. This will be its first U.S. presentation.

Also on view is Road Trip, an installation of slides made by Bures Miller’s grandfather in the 1950s, during a drive from Vancouver to New York City. Projected from a computer controlled carousel onto a standing screen, the slides show mostly empty landscapes, their color often changed by time. Accompanying them is a two-speaker recording of Cardiff and Bures Miller. In it, the artists consider what the enigmatic photographs might have meant to Anton Bures, who was traveling to New York to see a doctor for the cancer he was fighting. Cardiff and Bures Miller’s open-ended conversation uncovers questions about photography’s role in memory, time and the yearning for permanence.