Harbourfront Centre - Fresh Ground new works

Fifteen Restless Nights is an image/text/sound collaborative art installation of a map-like journey across the night-time landscape of Canada.

Fifteen large-scale, high-resolution images of individual unmade beds, reconstructed from photographs gathered over nights spent in motel rooms across Canada, will be reproduced on vinyl geotrans, and realized as black and white electro-microscopic images incorporating text fragments based on individual anonymous experiences men and women have had in motel rooms across Canada.

An original jazz piece based on the theme of long night highways between cities will be integrated with the fragmented telling of fifteen original texts, recorded as spoken word in French and English.

The Collaborators

Derek Michael Besant, RCA: Artist & Project Lead
Paul Connolly: composer
The Bent Spoon Ensemble: contemporary jazz trio
Diane Schoemperlen: author
Sophie Saboureau McGoey: horticultural science
Yves Trépanier: language teacher
Randy Otto: President, The Pattison Outdoor Group Canada
Jane Nokes: Director, Corporate Archives and Fine Art, Scotiabank Group
K. Gwen Frank: vocal practitioner
Renée Anique Francoeur: translator

Commissioned in 2006

Presented in the York Quay Gallery
as part of Visual Arts at York Quay Centre
September 16 – November 5, 2007

Fresh Ground new works is made possible by the generosity of several major individual donors who have actively assisted in the creation of new Canadian artworks: Peter Allen, Lionel F. Conacher and Joan Dea, Margaret and Jim Fleck, John Kazanjian and Susan Soloway, Michael and Sonja Koerner, Judy and Wil Matthews, George E. Myhal, and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the J.P. Bickell Foundation.

Fresh Ground new works

Commissions

Fifteen Restless Nights

The Collaborators