September 22 – October 1, 2023
The Main Gallery
Presented for 2023 Alberta Culture Days + 2023 Design Week @ Harcourt House
“And All of Everything” is an immersive audio/visual experience. Two nationally and internationally celebrated, Edmonton-based artists: Brad Necyk (visual/new media artist and filmmaker) and Gary James Joynes (composer, sound designer, new media artist) transport the viewers to an extraordinary digital environment. Two minimalist experimental films: “Joshua Tree” and “Avatar’s Dream” play in a never-ending loop. The works reflect on the nature of time, consciousness, ecology, and climate change. Passing through cycles of day and night, the viewers are invited to wander the space between consciousness and dreaming.
Inspired by two iconic landscapes, the arid deserts of Joshua Tree in California, contrast beautifully with the lush forests of Avatar Grove on Vancouver Island. The viewers bear witness to these breathtaking landscapes, their physical and spiritual weight elegantly archived within a digital realm.
Joynes’s entrancing soundscapes are inseparably entwined with Necyk’s arresting visual narratives. Complex, multi-layered sounds are uniquely attuned to each subtle visual change. The smallest details are perfectly punctuated, elevating and intensifying the beauty and emotion of both the visual and audio elements. While sound reverberates throughout the body, one’s field of vision is filled by the mesmerizing video. Necyk and Joynes create the sensation of synesthesia: of seeing, hearing, and feeling the artworks all at once.
Artist’s Biographies
Brad Necyk is a visual artist and writer whose practice focuses on mental illness, empathy, consciousness, and flourishing. He recently completed a research-creation PhD in Psychiatry at the University of Alberta, and his doctoral research was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Brad’s first book of poetry on mental illness, art, and healing, titled ALL SKY, MIRROR OCEAN: A Healing Manifesto, will be published in 2023. Brad Necyk is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at York University in Cinema and Media Arts, creating artistic works, poetry, and films on addiction and organ transplantation.
Gary James Joynes (a.k.a. Clinker) is an Edmonton-based award-winning sound composer, sound designer, and a visual artist. Gary has been active for several years in the international live audio-visual and experimental music performance community. He blends the beauty and physicality of sounds auditory and visual elements in Live Cinema AV performances and in rigorous and emotionally compelling photo and video installation works. The most recent chapter in Joynes’s audio-visual catalogue presented a large-scale solo installation work entitled Broken Sound at dc3 Art Projects in Edmonton in May of 2015. Broken Sound was awarded the 2016 Eldon and Ann Foote Edmonton Visual Art Prize for best solo art show in 2015. His critically acclaimed work Ouroboros had its large-scale premiere as a featured work in the City Hall at the inaugural Nuit Blanche Edmonton Festival in September 2015. Gary’s forthcoming visual-sound installation entitled ((( Sonic Suns ))) will premiere on October 12, 2023 at the Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton. The exhibition will be on display until November 18, 2023.
Top Image: Joshua Tree (detail), 2020, film still
Image courtesy of Brad Necyk
Presenting Partner:
