An airplane glides calmly through the clouds, before crashing into the ground in a nightmare of screams and static.
“On Air,” Franco-Ontarian artist Genevieve Thauvette’s latest piece, was just one of the works explored during a discussion of her art Sept. 17 at PDA Projects, a gallery recently opened on Elgin Street.
Wearing a colourful houndstooth dress and white knee socks, Thauvette started the talk by excitedly greeting the audience. Throughout the evening she strayed from the discussion held by Nuit Blanche Ottawa+Gatineau to laugh, dance, and occasionally stick her tongue out.
Her photographs, installations, and performances explore gender and ethnicity. One of Thauvette’s main focuses for her piece for this year’s Nuit Blanche was a “running theme of disaster.”
“On Air” allows participants to sit inside of a model airplane cabin while watching a video of flying through the sky. The monotonous clip, however, is broken apart by airplane crash scenes from movies and in-flight safety videos.
Simultaneously the participant hears a resonant frequency of 19 hertz, a level that has been disputed scientifically for its association with haunted sites and its name as the “fear frequency,” said Thauvette.
The piece also contains audio of air traffic controllers dealing with real-life emergencies.
“It’s of people, in a lot of cases, perishing,” said Thauvette. “You can hear, in certain clips, their death screams.”
“The first listen to these clips really had me in tears. It’s not a good thing, but I knew that if I was reacting so strongly to audio, even weeks later, that I was on the right track.”
However, Thauvette said she anticipates many people will not see the true intent of her piece and may even be troubled, or insulted. Thauvette said she hopes participants realize her piece is set against a “backdrop of beauty.”
“I would like to create an experience wherein which someone feels that anxiety, and then maybe thinks more empathetically of what occurs during those final moments.”
“On Air” is Thauvette’s third piece for Nuit Blanche. In 2012, the festival’s first year, she performed “Cake is Freedom,” a piece that explored the theme of revolution.
The performance involved Thauvette dressed as Marie Antoinette singing inside of the notorious dessert, as well as burlesque dancers who handed out cake to the audience.
“I sang ‘La Marseillaise’ for about eight hours straight,” said Thauvette with a laugh.
Megan Smith, creative director of Nuit Blanche, called “Cake is Freedom” one of the “most captivating and mesmerizing pieces” she had seen in her entire career.
It’s this participatory nature of Nuit Blanche that works best, said Anna Paluch, administrative assistant for the festival.
“Usually if it’s an arts festival, you think you go into a gallery, you look at the art and you walk away. It’s very one-sided. You don’t get anything from it,” Paluch said. “But with performance, you’re a part of the art as well.”
