Olivia Whetung

2021Soundings

Apr 14

(Anishinaabe)
b. Peterborough ON, Mississauga Anishinaabe Territory 1991
Currently based on Chemong Lake, Mississauga Anishinaabe Territory

Strata
2018
11/0 Miyuki Seedbeads, jar, bottles, metal plinth and shelf, audio recording
Collection of the Artist

PART ONE
Drop beads into the jar. Listen to the layering of colours.

PART TWO
Once filled to the brim, the jar of beads is delivered to the artist to make into a single piece, following the layers as a pattern. Bead echoes remain in the gallery.

PART THREE
Beadwork from the previous exhibitions return to the gallery, resounding together. Touch and listen.

Olivia Whetung is anishinaabekwe and a member of Curve Lake First Nation. She completed her BFA with a minor in anishinaabemowin at Algoma University in 2013, and her MFA at the University of British Columbia in 2016. Whetung works in various media including beadwork, printmaking, and digital media. Her work explores acts of/active native presence, as well as the challenges of working with/in/through Indigenous languages in an art world dominated by the English language. Her work is informed in part by her experiences as an anishinaabemowin learner. Whetung is from the area now called the Kawarthas, and presently resides on Chemong Lake.

PERFORMANCE OF A COMPOSITION FOR CARILLON AND BRASS
BY ATHENA LOREDO
7 MINUTES, 58 SECONDS

Presented by the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery
Ladner Clock Tower Carillon, UBC Campus, 2020

Whetung invites gallery visitors to pour different coloured beads from individual small jars into mason jar, creating a layering of sounds as each bead joins the growing pile. Once the container is filled, the artist turns the amalgam of beads into an entirely new piece – a rectangular beadwork unique to the host gallery’s iteration of the exhibition. Whetung creates a new beadwork for each gallery the Soundings exhibition is presented, each work hanging in succession.

These various forms of interaction on behalf of viewers as well as the artist herself disrupt the notion of a work of art as a complete and finished product. Whetung forces us to question the temporality of the piece to insist upon its existence along a timeline outside of the traditional exhibition cycle. The creation of the beadwork, at first dictated by the random ordering of pours from gallery visitors, is then reconfigured to newly encapsulate the traces of their divergent temporalities. Each bead is reordered into a unique visual network, its pattern appearing as a notation to be read, played and interpreted.

A series of performances by students from the UBC School of Music interpreted and activated Whetung’s beadworks as scores themselves. Shifting our understanding of Whetung’s pixilated composition as a digital score, Sasha Kow, Athena Loredo and Joseph Stacy “played” these works through the Ladner Clock Tower’s carillon, the chiming mechanism that emulates the sounds of bells. An engagement with the work as such intends to investigate how a score can be a call and tool for decolonization, challenging scripts of understanding that are often taken as absolute, and thinking about the resonances that intermedial and interdisciplinary engagement can foster.

UBC’s clock tower is not unlike the community clocks found in public plazas throughout the Western world. The echo of bells resounding across public space asserts the notion that the experience of time is common to all.

Writing about the role of bells in Canadian history, musicologist Patrick Nickleson notes that “settler Canadians were being trained into a form of nostalgic listening within which bells were a symbol of the harmonious community shared by both “native” and “newcomer” Canadians, with its reference to Old World community.”[1] He also describes how bells functioned as insidious colonizing tools, especially in Residential Schools: “This sonic and temporal organization aimed to break Indigenous children from their families, language, and culture such that students are sonically impelled to learn different relationships even to time. Students were expected to internalize the individual meaning of several rings per day and how that should dictate their relationship to time and their imposed duties and obligations.”[2]

UBC’s Ladner Clock Tower and carillon were gifted to the University in 1967 by Leon J. Ladner to commemorate British Columbia’s “pioneers” and in particular to the donor’s uncle William Ladner and father Thomas Ladner. As settlers to the town of Ladner in 1868, Ladner credits his family’s patriarchs as having “contributed much to the economic and political foundations of British Columbia.”

The original Ladner carillon was, according to archivist Erwin Wodarczak, “composed of 330 small bronze bars that could be played by small metal hammers. In 1997, as he points out, “it was replaced by a digital system able to play a variety of synthesized bell sounds. The clock is controlled by a master mechanism housed in the equipment building beside it.”[3] A 1998 article in UBC News describes this upgrade as being fully digital, with the option of the new carillon being played manually or programmed to play automatically. “It is capable of producing synthesized bell sounds including celesta, harp, chime, cast Flemish and English.”[4]

In essence, the clock tower serves as a tall speaker stand – its height ensuring the sound is broadcast far and wide across the campus.

1. PATRICK NICKELSON, “THE MESSAGE OF THE CARILLON: BELLS AS INSTRUMENTS OF COLONIALISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CANADA,” INTERSECTIONS 36:2 (2016), HTTPS://WWW.ERUDIT.ORG/EN/JOURNALS/IS/2016-V36-N2-IS03986/1051594AR/
2. IBID., HTTPS://WWW.ERUDIT.ORG/EN/JOURNALS/IS/2016-V36-N2-IS03986/1051594AR/
3. ERWIN WODARCZAK, “THE CLOCK TOWER AND THE ANARCHISTS,” TREK, JUNE 1, 2020, HTTPS://TREKMAGAZINE.ALUMNI.UBC.CA/2013/DEC-2013/FEATURES/THE-CLOCK-TOWER-AND-THE-ANARCHISTS/
4. “CARILLON BELLS TOLL FOR STUDENTS, VISITORS ALIKE,” UBC NEWS, MAY 21, 1998, HTTPS://NEWS.UBC.CA/1998/05/21/ARCHIVE-UBCREPORTS-1998-98MAY21-BELLS/

Standing on the crest of the grassy knoll in front of the AMS Student Nest, Lucy Strauss conjures both familiar and unconventional sounds from the viola in response to a beaded score created by Anishinaabe artist Olivia Whetung.

Read more about this and other Sonic Responses here.