SONGSHOW is an exhibition of eight artworks which each subject a particular song to a wild (but discerning) transformation. With something of the original still intact, each artwork moves the associations and affect of the song onto new terrain. Led Zepplin is played against the iconic landscape of the West Coast and at the foot of the stairs of St. Paul’s Cathedral; Britney Spears lands in the antebellum cotton fields and Prince in a Glasgow bed-sit.

The Artists:


Lone orchestra Anti-Cool in collaboration with Duchess Says, Japan, Canada, single channel video

Anti-cool's project is one of becoming someone else through imitation. “Through her various substitution projects, she has had the privilege to be many different people : language teacher, waitress, news-paper salesman, itinerant. Through this process, she tries to target the boundaries surrounding individuals hoping to find ways to exceed them” (dare-dare). In Lone orchestra, Anti-cool collaborates with Montreal band Duchess Saysas she attempts to master each individual band member’s instrument and style.

Anti-Cool on-line

 

Trilogy Beagles and Ramsey, Scotland, single channel video

Beagles and Ramsey remove the popular, over exposed melodies of Madonna and Prince songs to create a disturbing rendition of lost love. Trapped inside a Glasgow bedsit, the two artists made up as geriatric versions of themselves perform the lyrics in a monotone monologue. Evacuating the happy pop elements, they leave viewers in a space simultaneously familiar but increasingly disturbing.

Beagles & Ramsay on-line

 

Double Karen (Close to You) Candice Breitz, Germany, single channel videos on podiums.


In a brutally abridged version of a pre-historical music video, Karen Carpenter sings “Me, Me, Me, Me,” on a monitor placed on one side of a passage-like room, across from a second Karen Carpenter whose overlapping reply is “You, You, You…."  

Candice Breitz online

 

I’m a Slave 4 U Michael Paul Britto, USA, single channel video

Michael Paul Britto uses a cast of Black actors dressed in 19th century slave costume enacting choreographed gestures that recall tasks such as cleaning and picking cotton in order to create a disturbing remake of Britney Spears’ I’m a Slave 4 U music video.
 

Michael Paul Britto online

 

  

Subtitled Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Canada, single channel video

Nemerofsky Ramsay traces the words to Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head on an invisible screen that seals him in the melancholy space of his bedroom.  

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay online

  

The Stairway at St. Paul’s Jeroen Offerman, Netherlands, single channel video

For three months, Offerman practiced singing the inverted phonetics of Led Zepplin’s most famous song, Stairway to Heaven. He then proceeded to the steps of St. Paul’s cathedral in London to perform and record the entire song which was then played in reverse against an instrumental karaoke track to create the video.  

Jeroen Offerman online

  

Let it be Steina and Woody Vasulka, USA, single channel video

Early (1970) adaptation of a pop song by seminal video artists. Lips, teeth and spit trace the words to the Beatles' song in an extreme close-up of a performance by Steina.

Steina and Woody Vasulka online