The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum is first and foremost an immersive exhibition by the artistic duo of Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau. The two visual arts explorers are also musicians (AIDS Wolf!), which led them to compose the soundtrack for a video integrated into the exhibition. This multidisciplinary mise en abîme is captured here on a recording that highlights the eclectic side of the Montreal duo’s musical inspirations.
You have to imagine the spatial context of the music, heard in a video seen on a TV screen inserted into a room decorated in spectacular primary colours and kitsch furnishings, suggesting a fusion of references ranging from garden parties to classic comics, via Pop art and Piet Mondrian. In this playful space, as I said, there is a video screen where artists sing and dance a sort of zany sound circus in which the grotesque rubs shoulders with a post-modernity that is fully asserted. A brass and percussion orchestra evokes schizophrenic jazz, or sometimes an intoxicated and, on the edge, ecstatic samba.
The music brings to life epistolary texts “written” by a fictitious Brazilian author, hence the references to samba. In these letters, the artist seeks advice on how best to learn to live with chronic pain. In the video, it is the dances and choreographed movements that act as the answers. The many layers of meaning build a rich symbolic and expressive edifice.
The music is in harmony with the visual work on the theatricality of space and objects/scenery, and their reinterpretation in an offbeat situationism that combines self-referencing, colourful and purely plastic aestheticism, and free symbolism.
I think you’ll have to go and see the exhibition if you want to vibrate to the same tune as the artists, but you can still imagine the sense of post-pop art wackiness you might feel.
It’s rare for soundtracks written for exhibitions/installations to be so strong in theatrical expressionism. It certainly makes you want to go. Unfortunately, for the time being, you’ll have to make do with the pictures alongside the music.
