Vocal Tracts @ WAAP

Decrease Font Size Increase Font Size Text Size Print This Page Send by Email

Intimate yet exquisite premiere evening of mouth/vocal-themed work

Photos and words by Ash Tanasiychuk

The night was sweaty. Vancouver was in the thick of it’s hottest and driest summer in recent history. It was also fireworks night, which meant most people were heading to the West End of the city. Yet curiosity got the better of a group of folk took Wil Aballe up on his invite-only offer to see & hear WAAP‘s newest exhibition, Vocal Tracts, before opening night.

The dedicated group squeezed into Aballe’s intimate yet exquisite gallery space – it truly is incredible what he is doing with his space, how he is working with the constraints in an highly impressive way, curating consistently excellent shows! – to view Patricia Huijnen‘s work and hear Lief Hall‘s voice.

Huijnen’s sculptures reference the mouth in one form or another, from a bitten spoon to spheres that form syllables. In collaboration/complementation, Hall performed a short set of auditory sound – not so much music as vocal emotion – screeching and calling and summoning voices from another world.

Between breaths, you could hear a pin drop. And with Huijnen’s work flanking either side of her, it was easy to let Hall’s hypnotic live sounds carry our vision to the sculptures, to the air carrying sounds, back and forth, our senses bouncing between sound & physicality, vibrating like speech, coughs, or screams of excitement.