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.

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.

Join us at the Belkin for a concert 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. Consisting of six different sections - one for each of Lichtig’s text-based Blank Spot Notes - 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.  

In lieu of a public concert at the Belkin as has occurred in recent years, musicians from UBC Contemporary Players chose a work by a Canadian composer to perform in an empty gallery, responding to the works of Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts. Videos of these performances are shared here for reference, research, and enjoyment in perpetuity. Soundings asks how a score can be a call and a tool for decolonization. The exhibition's corresponding investigations take at their centre questions of embodiment and subjectivity, of calls and responses. What are the practical matters of embodied decolonization, and how can we practice them? How does embodiment facilitate unlearning, unknowing, and the visioning of Indigenous ontologies?

A year after it was first performed and in collaboration with composer Patrick Carrabré, Métis soprano Melody Courage will interpret Tania Willard’s Woodpile Score (2018) through vocal performance at Haida House outside the Museum of Anthropology, UBC. In the fall of 2020, Courage performed this same work as part of the exhibition Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery for an online audience.  

This past spring, the Belkin welcomed the UBC School of Music Contemporary Players as they responded to Stations: Some Recent Acquisitions. Directed by Paolo Bortolussi, the Contemporary Players ensemble includes graduate and undergraduate students focusing on music and performance of our time. In lieu of a public concert at the Belkin as has occurred in recent years, responses were adapted to follow public health orders amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.