Storm Room (in a house in Doichi, Japan), 2009

10 minute mixed media installation with audio, water and light.

NOTE: Storm Room and 40 Part Motet will play one after the other.

Originally produced for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan, 2009  Construction: Eric Fagervik, Eric Kutschker, Gary, Robyn Moody, Maryke Simmonds, Jason Gordon, Sound Design: Titus Maderlechner

Janet; “I was on a site visit to Japan to look for a location for a piece for the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial. I was shown into this traditional, old Japanese house that, for some reason, in the upstairs had this abandoned sixties western style dentist office, with strange large double spaced windows almost like a winter garden. I thought it might be really cool to have water in there, to have it pouring down the windows. I liked the idea that you would walk into the house on the ground floor and then hear the sound of thunder from upstairs and then you would find a storm in the room upstairs where it would be raining. I thought of it as a really surrealistic thing that would happen, something that connects to dreams, where you walk into different rooms. We wanted to create this situation where it is not logical…”

George; “I think it was ten years before we had visited Disneyland in California. We were in The Enchanted Tiki Room, which is pretty boring with birds singing, really rudimentary animatronics but suddenly at one point thunder roared and rain started pouring down the windows; we looked at each other. We both thought it would be amazing to make a piece where it rained inside.”

Janet; “Tokamachi is also a region in Japan known for its intense storms and when I was there it torrentially rained one day. It poured down like a river. Very inspirational”

George; “so we decided to work on a storm piece for the dentist office in that house in this village in Japan. We built a replica of the room in our studio in Canada to test the water and the sound. We found the sculptural aspect of this build quite interesting, we really liked the feeling of being inside a set. I’m not sure at what point we realized that the piece could also be a  standalone gallery work and show outside of the context of the house in Doichi, but that’s of course what happened… “

Below from the article Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller by Dan Adler in Reviews, Frieze Magazine Issue 158 OCT 13

“….This sort of compositional cocktail was pared down in the sparse Storm Room (2009), which was mostly bare. But this space was hardly barren: visitors were immersed in the atmosphere of torrential rain and lightning. As with the interruptive introduction of a crude guitar riff in Opera, the meditative qualities of the work were undercut by an occasional flash from a fluorescent light, the sudden roar of thunder, or a disconcerting stream of water that dribbled from the ceiling into buckets. While never resorting to theme-park theatrics, these elements created unease, provoking thoughts about how spaces of anxiety may become sites of perseverance. In addition, the sights and sounds of weather staged in this dim, muggy room somehow acquired an agency on their own, with qualities analogous to our breathing bodies, with a beating heart akin to the water hitting buckets.”

Full article here: https://www.frieze.com/article/janet-cardiff-george-bures-miller