Janet Cardiff’s memory is full of sounds from her parents’ farm in rural Canada. She recalls having to plunge a long knife into the gut of a cow bloated from eating too much alfalfa. “My dad had to get the vet, and in order to save the cow I had to release the air,” Cardiff says. “The air talks to you–it’s just opening and going ‘shooosh.’” This is one of many sounds the 37-year-old Cardiff conjures up in her installation An Inability to Make a Sound at Randolph Street Gallery.
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To begin Cardiff’s audiovisual exhibit, you put on a headset, pull back a black curtain, and enter a dimly lit room. Your steps trip off a motion detector that turns on a spotlight aimed at a phonograph playing an instructional record on tap dancing. For the next eight minutes, Cardiff’s mellifluous voice coaxes you to traverse a zigzag of planks balanced on cinder blocks, as an audio collage strings together sound effects like shattering porcelain, provocative dialogue, and snippets of stories. Several steps farther, another motion detector triggers a movie projector running a 30-second film loop of two girls in school uniforms struggling with one another in a wooded area; a fire blazes in the foreground.
Cardiff, who started out as a printmaker and photographer, has been working with sound since the mid-1980s. Her first audio work trekked through a forest. “At one point [the tape] says, ‘Look over across the river. There are two people standing there, walking there,’” she says. “Quite often people would come back and say” they had seen two people.
