Cardiff and Miller Art Warehouse

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are launching the Cardiff Miller Art Warehouse, a new exhibition venue in Enderby, British Columbia, where the artists will present a rotating selection of their works. Located at 507 Granville Street, the space will open on Saturday, July 29, 2023 with a public reception from 3-6pm.

The inaugural presentation will highlight four of Cardiff and Miller’s immersive, large-scale installations, including the Canadian debut of The Marionette Maker (2014). First exhibited at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain, the kinetic piece is comprised of a full-scale vintage caravan that houses a myriad of robotic characters in a haunting environment. Also on view will be The Murder of Crows (2008), a 98-channel audio installation that makes use of the expansive space of the Cardiff Miller Art Warehouse. Audio speakers are located throughout – on chairs, stands, and hanging from the ceiling – creating a filmic soundtrack that surrounds visitors in a dense auditory dream. A virtual choir installation, The Forty Part Motet (2001), is a re-working of Thomas Tallis’ Spem In Alium, which is an intensely emotional 16th century 40-part harmony choral composition. The recording was made with the Salisbury choir in England, and in this work the audio from each of the 40 separate speakers represents a voice in the choir, creating a very physical and sculptural experience of a Renaissance piece of music. The Poetry Machine (2017) is a small vintage organ with a collection of old speakers arranged around it – each key on the organ contains a different poem from Leonard Cohen’s The Book of Longing, read in his beautiful, gravelly voice. When a key is pressed on the organ, you hear Cohen read a poem, and then another once a separate key is pressed – the combinations and variations of keys creates linkages between lines of his poems, almost like creating new poems.

Miller says, “We’ve always wanted a permanent home to showcase our largest installations and when we discovered this huge space so close to where we live, we knew it was perfect.” 

The Cardiff and Miller Art Warehouse is open November 5 to December 17, Sunday ONLY from 11:00 - 5:00 pm. For more information about the project, please visit the Cardiff Miller Art Warehouse website.