Antony Knight is a young composer, actor and singer based in Vancouver, BC and is currently finishing his undergraduate degree in composition and opera performance at UBC. Knight’s compositional work ranges from chamber music, art song, film music, orchestral works and opera. Recently, he worked with Vancouver Opera to compose two short scenes for their New Works Program (2019), was awarded Best Score at the Persistence of Vision Film Festival for the film The Knockers (2019), premiered his opera “Oh Alfred!” at the Vernon Proms Classical Music Festival (2021) and had his orchestra piece “The Protector of the Okanagan” read by the Victoria Symphony Orchestra (2021).
Nadia Lichtig is an artist currently living in the South of France. In her multilayered work, voice is transposed into various media including painting, print, sculpture, photography, performance, soundscape and song—each medium approached not as a field to be mastered, but as a source of possibilities to question our ability to decipher the present. Visual and aural aspects entangle in her performances. Lichtig studied linguistics at the LMU Munich in Germany and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France with Jean-Luc Vilmouth, where she graduated with honours in 2001, before assisting Mike Kelley in Los Angeles the same year. She taught at the Shrishti School of Art and Technology, Bangalore, India as a visiting professor in 2006, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Valence in 2007 and is professor of Fine Arts at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-arts of Montpellier (MOCO-ESBA), France since 2009. She has collaborated with musicians who are also visual artists, such as Bertrand Georges (Audible), Christian Bouyjou (Popopfalse), Nicolu (La Chatte), Nina Canal (Ut) and Michael Moorley (The dead C). Lichtig worked and works under several group names and pseudonyms (until 2009: EchoparK, Falseparklocation, Skrietch, Ghosttrap and Nanana).
Join us at the Belkin for a choral performance based on artist Nadia Lichtig’s Blank Spots, currently on view as part of the exhibition Drift: Art and Dark Matter. Composers Antony Knight and Walker Williams were invited by the School of Music to interpret Lichtig’s Blank Spots as a musical score. Alongside Knight and Williams, singers Armand Birk, Sydney Frelick, Kari Rutherford and Tessa Waddell will perform the musical score, while the artist Nadia Lichtig will also be in attendance. This event is free and open to the public, but proof of vaccination is required. For UBC students, faculty and staff, an active UBC card with accompanying photo ID can be used instead.
Consisting of six different sections – one for each of Lichtig’s text-based Blank Spot Notes – composers Knight and Williams’s score explores the themes of the text present in each note. The collaborative composition frames questions and concepts related to dark matter, such as the inability to directly observe or measure it, through various uses of rhythm and pitch. While rhythm and pitch are not strictly defined in the piece, the composition instead allows variation to arise unpredictably through individual actions of the singers themselves.
Consisting of a series of frottages paired with texts, Nadia Lichtig’s Blank Spots (2021-ongoing) explores the void between object and history through queries intersecting with how dark matter is studied or sought to be understood. Frottages or imprints from the scenes where Pogroms, or war crimes committed against common people have taken place, raise questions of how their meanings or contexts have been obscured and how memory and impressions of these sites resonate with the present. A selection of sound pieces give witness through a series of accompanying fragmentary notes, Blank Spot Notes, which include the sound of breath and use of language. Theatre lights, guided by the sound of breath, show the frottages under different lighting conditions. Produced in conversation with the Drift: Art and Dark Matter Residency at SNOLAB, the work references understandings of dark matter as an ancient relic holding the memory of the universe – but something not yet able to be directly detected or observed.
Antony Knight is a young composer, actor and singer based in Vancouver, BC and is currently finishing his undergraduate degree in composition and opera performance at UBC. Knight’s compositional work ranges from chamber music, art song, film music, orchestral works and opera. Recently, he worked with Vancouver Opera to compose two short scenes for their New Works Program (2019), was awarded Best Score at the Persistence of Vision Film Festival for the film The Knockers (2019), premiered his opera “Oh Alfred!” at the Vernon Proms Classical Music Festival (2021) and had his orchestra piece “The Protector of the Okanagan” read by the Victoria Symphony Orchestra (2021).
Nadia Lichtig is an artist currently living in the South of France. In her multilayered work, voice is transposed into various media including painting, print, sculpture, photography, performance, soundscape and song—each medium approached not as a field to be mastered, but as a source of possibilities to question our ability to decipher the present. Visual and aural aspects entangle in her performances. Lichtig studied linguistics at the LMU Munich in Germany and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France with Jean-Luc Vilmouth, where she graduated with honours in 2001, before assisting Mike Kelley in Los Angeles the same year. She taught at the Shrishti School of Art and Technology, Bangalore, India as a visiting professor in 2006, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Valence in 2007 and is professor of Fine Arts at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-arts of Montpellier (MOCO-ESBA), France since 2009. She has collaborated with musicians who are also visual artists, such as Bertrand Georges (Audible), Christian Bouyjou (Popopfalse), Nicolu (La Chatte), Nina Canal (Ut) and Michael Moorley (The dead C). Lichtig worked and works under several group names and pseudonyms (until 2009: EchoparK, Falseparklocation, Skrietch, Ghosttrap and Nanana).
Drift: Art and Dark Matter is a residency and exhibition project generated by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute and SNOLAB. Four artists of national and international stature were invited to make new work while engaging with physicists, chemists and engineers contributing to the search for dark matter at SNOLAB’s facility in Sudbury, two kilometres below the surface of the Earth.
[more]On select Saturdays and Sundays, join us for short drop-in tours of Drift: Art and Dark Matter with UBC Department of Physics graduate student Rhea Gaur. While advance registration is not required, tours will be capped at 15 guests.
[more]Please join us for the opening of Drift: Art and Dark Matter with a performance-conversation by artists Denise Ferreira da Silva and Jol Thoms. Ferreira da Silva and Thoms will touch on intersections between Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) and n-Land (2021), both of which will play throughout the evening on the Belkin Screen.
[more]Resources related to the artists in Drift: Art and Dark Matter. This list is not exhaustive, but rather comprised of suggested readings compiled by researchers at the Belkin. These readings are intended to provide additional context for the exhibition and act as springboards for further research or questions stemming from the exhibition, artists and works involved.
[more]The long search for dark matter has put the spotlight on the limitations of human knowledge and technological capability. Confronted with the shortcomings of our established modes of detecting, diagnosing and testing, the search beckons the creation of new ways of learning and knowing. Fusing the praxes of arts and science in the emergent fields of interdisciplinary research, Ars Scientia, a tripartite partnership between UBC's Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (Blusson QMI), the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Belkin, presents an opportunity to foster new modes of knowledge exchange across the arts, sciences and their pedagogies. Funded by UBC’s Research Excellence Cluster program, Ars Scientia will conduct rich programming and research to address this line of inquiry over the next two years beginning in 2021.
[more]Beginning in May 2021, the Ars Scientia research cluster connected artists with physicists in a collaborative residency program to discuss and explore the intersections between the disciplines of art and science. On Thursday, 25 November 2021, the groups convened at a research symposium, Signals and Apparatuses, to share their experiences in the residency and engage in an interdisciplinary discussion with the academic community at UBC. Denise Ferreira da Silva offered opening remarks, which were followed by a discussion with Drift exhibition artist Nadia Lichtig and graduate student Rhea Gaur, alongside presentations from Ars Scientia collaborators.
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