Device for Listening to Snow Falling

A new public work by Caitlind rc Brown & Wayne Garrett

February 26th 2023

2PM-5PM

St. Patrick's Island Park

commissioned by New Works Calgary with support from Canadian Heritage Recovery Fund

Device for Listening to Snow Falling invites audiences to engage in a participatory group performance of deep listening in the wintertime landscape. When temperatures drop and snow begins to fall, sound travels differently, moving further and more slowly. Snow absorbs sound, lowering the noise floor and quieting city spaces. Drawing from long histories of experimental sound and happenings, artists and musician Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett invite you to experience enhanced listening devices designed to expand your acoustic awareness – reaching further and more slowly into the soundscapes of familiar places. Be prepared for surprises!

Join us for listening, walking and a bonfire on February 26th at The Rise on St. Patrick’s Island, 2-5PM.  This event is kid and dog-friendly!

Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett explore the interspace between seemingly polarized entities: light + dark, nature + culture, DIY + institutional, individual + collective. Based in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, the duo centres their practice in relational space, conceptualizing installations and interventions primarily for the public realm. Their projects beckon viewers with novel materials and participatory contexts, inviting strangers to share in collaborative viewership. Beautiful, subversive, playful, and radically inclusive, their works transform the everyday through a critical shift in perspective.

Caitlind graduated from Alberta University of the Arts in 2010, earning an Alumni of Merit Career Award in 2019. Wayne trained as a musician at Mount Royal University and a machinist at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. Together, they have exhibited at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Russia), Weisman Art Museum (USA), Pera Museum (Turkey), Japan Alps Art Festival (Japan), the National Arts Centre (Canada), and other art spaces across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Their public projects include Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, AFTER IMAGE, and Delta Garden + The City Unseen in Calgary, CARBON COPY in Edmonton, and LIGHT KEEPER in Toronto. In 2019, they won Urban Design Awards for public artworks in Calgary and Edmonton, including the People’s Choice Award for CARBON COPY. Every month, the duo co-hosts a sound art radio program on CJSW 90.9 fm called EARS HAVE EYES. In collaboration with Lane Shordee, Caitlind & Wayne are currently Guiding Artists for The Wandering Island, a site-responsive project on a small island in the Elbow River.

Caitlind & Wayne maintain an experimental art practice, transpiring in wintertime domestic art intervention, The Hibernation Project. Whether exhibiting in formal galleries, pre-demolition buildings, public spaces, or their own backyard, Caitlind & Wayne believe in art’s potential to catalyze new understandings of the everyday.