To begin an audio walk, visitors are invited to borrow a portable CD player at the gallery's front desk and go for a stroll, guided by Cardiff's recorded voice along a pre-determined path. Her spoken and whispered words are intercut with bits of ambient sound or sound effects recorded in a binaural technique. These recordings appear to be three-dimensional and create a dislocating uncertainty concerning what is recorded "fiction" and what is "reality."

The artist asks visitors to walk with her, to match their steps with hers and to merge their thoughts with her own. Her imperatives ("turn right,""down the steps,""follow me") are necessary and lay the ground for an active course that combines map and memory. The participant listens as Cardiff reinvents a place charged with mythic or symbolic force. (Her walks often take place in gardens, over a few city blocks, or in museums.) She not only provides a geographical map but a map of an inner terrain. Participants follow her steps over various surfaces - cement, grass, a stone walkway, a bridge, a wood-chip path, down stairs, up a hilly slope - leading them through the site and helping them to navigate the story. The sounds of these textured surfaces dramatize the interrelationship between the inner and outer self and also make apparent physical and mental actions. There is a sense of wonder and shock when events and scenes described on the CD coincidentally happen in the real physical world, as they often do.

Cardiff's walks usually circle around the same themes - memories, displacement and desire. Disconnected thoughts, sounds, conversations and events are strung together in a sequence that suggests suspense and mystery. Cardiff, in effect, creates virtual spaces anchored in reality. She takes her participants to the crossroads of fiction and reality, the actual and the virtual, things remembered and newly experienced - a place where her words, sounds and visual imagery come together in hypnotic and emotional intensity.

Cardiff often works in collaboration with her husband, George Bures-Miller. They represented Canada at the 49th Venice Biennale with "The Paradise Institute" (2001), a 16-seat movie theatre where viewers watched a mystery film and became entangled as witnesses to a possible crime played out in the audience and on the screen. "The Paradise Institute" was a huge success and the artists won La Biennale di Venezia Special Award at Venice, which was presented to Canadian artists for the first time. The couple also won the Benesse prize, an award that recognizes an artist, or group, that tries to break new artistic ground with an experimental and pioneering spirit.

Cardiff's "Forty Part Motet" won the National Gallery of Canada's Millennium Prize in 2001. This installation was a reworking of the renaissance choral music "Spem in Alium" by the English composer Thomas Tallis (1514 - 1585) in which Cardiff recorded 40 separate voices of the Salisbury festival choir and played them back through 40 speakers strategically placed throughout the space. The artist put the gallery visitor in the middle of one of the most complex pieces of choral polyphony ever composed. She created a piece that would allow participants "to climb inside the music" and connect with the disparate voices. As gallery-goers walked around the room they could listen to the each of the voices in turn, or to all of them together from the middle of the room.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures-Miller currently live and work in Berlin, Germany. They have recently had exhibitions at the VANCOUVER ART GALLERY (2005), Luhring Augustine, New York (2004), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2003), ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO (2002), NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA (2002) and Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2000). A recent mid-career retrospective, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works, Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller, opened at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, Queens, in 2001 and has travelled to Montréal, Oslo, and Turin.

From the fall of 1945, when artist Lee Krasner and Pollock were married, they lived in the Springs, East Hampton, New York. In 1952, Pollock’s first solo show in Paris opened at the Studio Paul Facchetti and his first retrospective was organized by Clement Greenberg at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont. He was included in many group exhibitions, including the Annuals at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from 1946 and the Venice Biennale in 1950. Although his work was widely known and exhibited internationally, the artist never traveled outside the United States. He was killed in an automobile accident on August 11, 1956, in the Springs.

Pioneer of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

He began to study painting in 1929 at the Art Students' League, New York, under the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. During the 1930s he worked in the manner of the Regionalists, being influenced also by the Mexican muralist painters (Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros) and by certain aspects of Surrealism.

From 1938 to 1942 he worked for the Federal Art Project. By the mid 1940s he was painting in a completely abstract manner, and the `drip and splash' style for which he is best known emerged with some abruptness in 1947. Instead of using the traditional easel he affixed his canvas to the floor or the wall and poured and dripped his paint from a can; instead of using brushes he manipulated it with `sticks, trowels or knives' (to use his own words), sometimes obtaining a heavy impasto by an admixture of `sand, broken glass or other foreign matter'. This manner of Action painting had in common with Surrealist theories of automatism that it was supposed by artists and critics alike to result in a direct expression or revelation of the unconscious moods of the artist.

Pollock's name is also associated with the introduction of the All-over style of painting which avoids any points of emphasis or identifiable parts within the whole canvas and therefore abandons the traditional idea of composition in terms of relations among parts. The design of his painting had no relation to the shape or size of the canvas -- indeed in the finished work the canvas was sometimes docked or trimmed to suit the image. All these characteristics were important for the new American painting which matured in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

During the 1950s Pollock continued to produce figurative or quasi-figurative black and white works and delicately modulated paintings in rich impasto as well as the paintings in the new all-over style. He was strongly supported by advanced critics, but was also subject to much abuse and sarcasm as the leader of a still little comprehended style; in 1956 Time magazine called him `Jack the Dripper'.

By the 1960s, however, he was generally recognized as the most important figure in the most important movement of this century in American painting, but a movement from which artists were already in reaction (Post-Painterly Abstraction). His unhappy personal life (he was an alcoholic) and his premature death in a car crash contributed to his legendary status. In 1944 Pollock married Lee Krasner (1911-84), who was an Abstract Expressionist painter of some distinction, although it was only after her husband's death that she received serious critical recognition.

Breaking the ice

It was Jackson Pollock who blazed an astonishing trail for other Abstract Expressionist painters to follow. De Kooning said, "He broke the ice", an enigmatic phrase suggesting that Pollock showed what art could become with his 1947 drip paintings.

It has been suggested that Pollock was influenced by Native American sand paintings, made by trickling thin lines of colored sand onto a horizontal surface. It was not until 1947 that Pollock began his "action" paintings, influenced by Surrealist ideas of "psychic automatism" (direct expression of the unconscious). Pollock would fix his canvas to the floor and drip paint from a can using a variety of objects to manipulate the paint.

The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle   (1943; 109.5 x 104 cm (43 x 41 in)) is an early Pollock, but it shows the passionate intensity with which he pursued his personal vision. This painting is based on a North American Indian myth. It connects the moon with the feminine and shows the creative, slashing power of the female psyche. It is not easy to say what we are actually looking at: a face rises before us, vibrant with power, though perhaps the image does not benefit from labored explanations. If we can respond to this art at a fairly primitive level, then we can also respond to a great abstract work such as Lavender Mist. If we cannot, at least we can appreciate the fusion of colors and the Expressionist feeling of urgency that is communicated. Moon-Woman may be a feathered harridan or a great abstract pattern; the point is that it works on both levels.