Charles Stankievech. The Eye of Silence Series, 2022. Video Still.
The Eye of Silence
Charles Stankievech
May 10 – June 18, 2023
Contemporary Calgary is pleased to extend The Eye of Silence, the video segment of The Desert Turned to Glass, an ambitious exhibition by acclaimed Canadian artist Charles Stankievech. Presented in our Dome gallery, this panoramic and immersive video is accompanied by an emotive soundscape composed by Stankievech.
The Desert Turned to Glass forms a place where the cosmic and the chthonic collide. From March 2 to May 7 this transmedia installation inhabited both the planetarium’s dome and the subterranean space below, whereby the visitor experienced a stratified ecosystem spread across multiple levels within the building, while representing vast distances in space and time.
As in the larger project, Stankievech’s video work The Eye of Silence, explores alternative theories of the origin of life, consciousness and art. He marshals high atmospheric video recordings of the Albertan Badlands, the Utah Salt Flats, Icelandic & Japanese volcanoes, and a meteorite crater in the Namibian desert. Visualizing the Earth at the critical moments of its evolution–this presentation speculates about the moment when life on the planet was seeded from a frozen meteorite.
Accompanying the visuals, temporality and timelessness entwine in a sonic fugue, combining both subterranean beats and cosmic noise—inviting the visitor to meditate on deep time, deep space, and deep listening. In dialogue with contemporary scientific research, the exhibition also comprises original field recordings by Stankievech of solar rays (whistling within the earth’s ionosphere), hydrophone recordings of crackling Arctic ice and flowing Yucatan cenotes (created by a meteorite impact), and ambisonic recordings captured within the Canary Islands’ volcanic calderas.
Spanning the abyss of space and the depths of the earth, The Eye of Silence is an epic meditation on origins, endings, and infinity.
An accompanying publication edited by Dehlia Hannah and Nadim Samman is set for release later in 2023.
About the Artist
Charles Stankievech (b. Okotoks, Canada) is an artist, writer and curator, whose award-winning work has been shown at institutions including the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; Kunste Werke, Berlin; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; National Gallery of Canada; TBA21, Vienna; as well as several biennials from Venice to SITE Santa Fe. He has lectured at dOCUMENTA (13) and the 8th Berlin Biennale, and his writing has been published by Verso, MIT, Sternberg Press, e-flux, and Princeton Architectural Press. He is an editor of Afterall Journal (U of Chicago Press), a co-founder of the Yukon School of Visual Art, and was Director of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto from 2015-2021, where he is currently Associate Professor. For 2022-23, Stankievech is a visiting researcher in the Department of Architecture at the University of Tokyo.
