My sun a pestilence burning at noon, and a vapour of death in night (2025)
currently at Venezia Contemporanea in Venice, Italy, from 30 April-16 May 2026.
(first shown from
10 March - 11 April 2025, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT
as part of “Emerging Dialogues in the Midnight Sun” group show)
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Project text from Venice:
My sun a pestilence burning at noon, and a vapour of death in night (2025) is a five-channel audio installation presenting sounds of climate change in the Arctic. During his participation in the 2023 Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency, which took place on and alongside the Svalbard archipelago north of Norway, the artist collected hours’ worth of field recordings, using standard audio recording equipment, hydrophones (underwater microphones), and contact microphones that measured pressure waves from internal changes in glaciers’ crystal structure. The resulting sonic library included the sounds of ice chunks clicking against one another like cubes in a cocktail; the surprisingly loud underwater sounds of ice chunks cracking in fjords, resembling the sound of a popcorn popper; larger chunks of ice audibly groaning against one another; the dripping of water from glaciers into the sea and the rushing sounds of runoff streams full of glacial melt.
The audio installation is portable and can be installed in different site-specific ways depending on the venue. In its current incarnation, the installation is located in a small interior garden within Venezia Contemporanea’s La Storta exhibition space.
The work’s title is borrowed from The Four Zoas, an poem by William Blake, in which the character Enion laments the breakdown of the natural world.