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The Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with the UC Santa Cruz’s Arboretum and Botanic Garden and the San Jose Museum of Art, is pleased to present FOREST (for a thousand years…), the beguiling and uncanny audio installation by renowned Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, April 7- June 30 2018. FOREST (for a thousand years…) will be installed in the redwood grove of UC Santa Cruz’s Arboretum and Botanic Garden. This is the West Coast debut of the 28-minute sound installation, originally commissioned for dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, Germany.
Saturday, April 7 Exhibition Opening
3-5 p.m. Public Reception w/ artist remarks
This event is FREE and open to the public. Parking is available at the Arboretum.
Detailed driving directions can be found here.
As Gregory Volk wrote of FOREST in Art in America , “A remarkable thing about Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s utterly captivating sound installation is how it blurs distinctions between site and art. You enter a clearing in the forest, sit down on a wooden stump, and simply listen. Cardiff and Bures Miller’s work incorporates the actual forest into an audio composition emitted from more than thirty speakers. Sometimes there is a near synchronicity of natural and mediated sounds, and it’s tough to discern what is live and what is recorded…. In turn frightening and deeply touching, ominous and serene, Cardiff and Bures Miller’s forest soundscape is a wonder.”(1)
FOREST (for a thousand years…) at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum and Botanic Garden has been generously sponsored by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust of the San Francisco Community Foundation, Wanda Kownacki, Rowland and Pat Rebele, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
1. Gregory Volk, A Walk in the dOCUMENTA Park, Art in America, June 15, 2012.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are internationally recognized artists known for their immersive multimedia sound installations and their audio and video walks. Their recent solo exhibitions include: 21st Century Museum, Kanazawa, (2017); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (2015); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2015); The Menil Collection, Houston, TX (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Being Modern: MoMA in Paris, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) and dOCUMENTA (13). In 2011, Cardiff and Miller won Germany’s prestigious Kathe Kollowitz Prize. They also represented Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale, for which they received the Biennale’s Premio Speciale (Special Prize) and the Benesse Prize.
Institute of the Arts and Sciences is an interdisciplinary exhibition and event forum in the Arts Division of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The IAS’s mission is to harness the creative power of the arts and the sciences to explore big questions and critical issues of our time. It contributes to the cultural life of UC Santa Cruz and features the work of nationally renowned artists and groundbreaking scientists and scholars. The IAS offers a range of public programs, sponsors residencies, and curates and organizes an ambitious exhibition program.
The UC Santa Cruz Arboretum is a research and teaching facility committed to plant conservation and serves both the campus and the public. Its rich and diverse collection, containing representatives of more than 300 plant families, provides beginning students with a broad survey of the plant kingdom. Facilities for growing plants offer students and research faculty opportunities to experiment with living plants. The Arboretum maintains collections of rare and threatened plants of unusual scientific interest.
The San Jose Museum of Art celebrates new ideas, stimulates creativity, and inspires connection with every visit. Welcoming and thought provoking, the Museum delights visitors with its surprising and playful perspective on the art and artists of our time. SJMA is a leading showcase in the Bay Area for modern and contemporary art. The Museum has earned a reputation for its fresh, distinctive exhibitions, which are conceived to engage Museum visitors of various ages and cultural backgrounds. Through its exhibitions and programs, SJMA addresses major trends in international contemporary art, architecture, and design, with an ongoing commitment to also place the work of California artists in national and international context.
Publicity for Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller and/ or FOREST (for a thousand years…):
Julie Halperin, “Who Can Tell a Forest’s Secrets? Janet Cardiff on What It Takes to Create a Truly Epic Work of Sound Art.” Artnet News. Aug. 2017.
John Wray, “Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller and the Power of Sound,” NYTimes, July, 2012.
