Over the course of several months, Kathleen Hearn walked beneath hydro lines near her home,  photographing birds gathered along the suspended wires. The ongoing, unpredictable configuration of the birds contrasted with the repetitive regularity of her walk, a quiet measure of duration. Observation gradually shifted to translation: wires rotated to horizontal resembled musical staff lines, birds perched as notes, the shifting sky as expression marks. The landscape reorganized as score. With a nod to the sparse visual field of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies, the images demonstrate openness and restraint. Installed across three walls, intervals between images act as rests. The viewer’s movement establishes tempo. Measure is present — through alignment, indexing, repetition — yet its authority is softened. The ordinary infrastructure of electrical lines set in a documentary landscape transforms as open musical structure, the birds as small, harmonic events, the habitual walk as daily measure. Some time does not advance, it lingers.

From the artist:

Sky/Cloud/Birds engages in longstanding interests in sound, tied to both landscape (place) and portrait — and in some ways the collapse, or linking, of these two things. This work in some ways is both a nod to Satie — but also a nod to being an artist — and considering what it means to make, be a maker and exist in a landscape. Coming out of pandemic where we sheltered in place, the work in many ways was an attempt to hold a mirror (lens) to myself and my place in the world.  

Reading Satie’s La Journée du musicien, I was struck not only by the absurdity of recording a day down to the minute, but by the bureaucratic seriousness with which he performs it. The white diet—sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, turnips, fish, cheese—is at once methodical and irrational. The restriction feels clinical, almost administrative. It is less a description of appetite than an imposed system. Satie’s absurdity is delivered deadpan; it mimics regulation rather than rebellion.

In making Portrait of an Amnesiac, I treated the list as protocol.  The still life becomes an enactment of classification: white as rule, portion as measure, repetition as discipline. Historically, still life painting has staged abundance, allegory, or decay. Here, the image operates as inventory.

Kathleen Hearn is a Toronto-based artist whose practice often unfolds through long-term negotiations, collaborations, and cooperative processes. Her projects explore connections between sound, portrait and landscape, documentary and fiction. Hearn’s work has been exhibited throughout Canada and internationally, including Mexico, China, Argentina, Iceland, Senegal, Benin, Nigeria, Cuba, and Paraguay. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Guelph. She is currently a Professor of Photography in the collaborative B.A. program between Sheridan College and University of Toronto Mississauga.