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EARS HAVE EYES // Episode 38
Airing Wednesday, April 9, 2025 at 8 pm MST
on CJSW 90.9 FM, NAISA, & Golden Co-Op Radio

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DEVICES FOR LISTENING:
sound sculptures & sculptural sounds

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FEATURING:
Artist Lou Sheppard & Curator Jacqueline Bell

This program is co-hosted by Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett and edited by Caitlind Brown. Thanks to CJSW, Golden Co-Op Radio, and NAISA (especially Kaamil, Claire, and Darren) for supporting the show.

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EARS HAVE EYES is a monthly sound art radio program airing on CJSW 90.9 FM in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, Golden Co-op Radio in Golden, BC, and NAISA Radio in South River, Ontario. You can listen to podcasts of previous episodes here.

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For our April & May episodes, we’re diving into listening devices, sound sculptures, and the objects that mediate the sounds that surround us. DEVICES FOR LISTENING highlights artists who build sonic installations, deep listeners who use devices for amplification, visual artists who work with sound recordings as a material, and composers experimenting with the aesthetics of sound…

Our first episode centres around sound artist, Lou Sheppard, and his work Dawn Chorus, Evensong (Bow River Valley), a piece in the ongoing Walter Philips Gallery exhibition Listening Devices at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Lou is joined by commissioning curator, Jacqueline Bell.

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Thanks to the participating artists and our friends at CJSW, NAISA, and Golden Co-op Radio!

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_{Lou Sheppard, Dawn Chorus, Evensong (Bow River Valley), 2024. Digital image. Commissioned by Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.}

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Lou Sheppard

Lou Sheppard works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practices. He has performed and exhibited across Canada, notably at The Art Gallery of York University, The Confederation Centre for the Arts, and at Plug-In ICA, and as part of the first Toronto Biennial, as well as internationally, at Kumu Kunstimuuseum in Estonia, in the Antarctic Biennial, and at Titanik Gallery in Finland. Lou has participated in numerous residencies, including the International Studio Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, NY., La Cité des Arts in Paris, and as participant and faculty at The Banff Centre. He has been longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2018, 2020 and 2021, and was the winner of the Emerging Atlantic Artist Award in 2017. Lou is a settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia. 

Artist Statement 

“My work focuses on climate crisis, loss, queer bodies and ecologies, responding to the material and discursive histories of sites, bodies and environments. I am committed to questioning and disrupting systems of power, by deconstructing the language, architectures, genealogies and taxonomies that hold these systems in place. Through unruly research methods I look for what isn’t present, what is in between, what isn’t said, and use processes of metaphor, semiotic shift, translation, and negative-space readings to evoke these in between – out of bounds spaces. 

This research is evidenced through graphic notations, scripts and scores which are often performed in collaboration with other artists and in community gatherings. These scores often define spaces of loss, erasure, tension, or relationality. I began working with graphic scores as a way of moving away from fixed ideas of notation, creating scores that define a time and place rather than an action within them. 

My work is often theatrical, and can engage audiences as performers in the works. This can happen explicitly, through the presentation of a script or score for an audience to follow, or more subtly, by presenting interactive installations that implicate the bodies of audience members in the presentation of the work. Recently I have become more focused on the architectures of performance spaces, and the possibilities for these spaces to be place for audience and performer to rehearse alternative, speculative futures.“

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Dawn Chorus, Evensong (Bow River Valley) is a newly commissioned audio-based work with accompanying visual scores by Canadian artist Lou Sheppard to be exhibited this summer in Banff Centre’s Shaw Amphitheatre. This seven-channel audio installation is a continuation of a previous body of work commissioned for the 2019 edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art. Informed by the concept of the biophony, or sounds made by organisms within a given ecosystem, Dawn Chorus, Evensong (Bow River Valley) seeks to amplify and respond to the chorus of creatures audible on Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain at dawn and at dusk, times of increased activity in the forest. The installation will be activated twice daily for one hour at 8 AM and 8 PM as well as subtly sounding intermittently throughout the day. The activation of the work also takes place at what might be understood as queer times of day, when visibility is lessened and ramifications of normative conceptions of gender perhaps less pervasive. Dawn Chorus, Evensong (Bow River Valley) is suggestive of the power of collective sounding as present within a biophony, where the pitches of a creature’s calls can allow them to be heard or concealed. The work’s location in the man-made structure of the Shaw Amphitheatre as well as within the natural acoustic bowl created by the mountains makes use of these overlapping architectures for listening, amplification and transmission.

Dawn Chorus Evensong (Bow River Valley) is made possible through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Government of Canada, and Government of Alberta.

Vocalists: Pamela Hart, Stewart Legere, Lou Sheppard and Stephanie Yee. The artist would like to thank Pamela Hart for her assistance and conversations about the project; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and staff Mimmo Maiolo, Tyler Jordan, Megan Feniak, Karen Howard and Jacqueline Bell. 

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Jacqueline Bell

Jacqueline Bell is curator at Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Recent exhibitions include Dawn Chorus, Evensong (Bow River Valley) by Lou Sheppard (2024); Listening Devices with works by Rebecca Belmore, Janet Cardiff, Raven Chacon, Lou Sheppard and T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss and Anne Riley (2024–ongoing); Gather Listen Hear (2024), co-organized with Megumi Masaki and Janine Windolph; Cassils: Movement (2024, co-curated with Carol Stakenas); The Shape of an Echo: Selections from the Permanent Collection (2022); darkness is as deep as the darkness is by Rita McKeough (2020); A materialist history of contagion by Candice Lin (2019); Guidelines by Carmen Papalia with Heather Kai Smith (2019); If the river ran upwards (2018) with Silvina Babich, Alana Bartol, Diane Borsato, Carolina Caycedo, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss and Anne Riley, and Genevieve Robertson; THE CAVE (2018) by Young Joon Kwak with Marvin Astorga, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Adrian Stimson, and Kim Ye; and the exhibition and performance, Everything I Say Is True (2017) by Kite. Prior to joining Walter Phillips Gallery, Bell contributed to a number of projects and exhibitions at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). As an independent writer, Bell has been published by C Magazine, FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, and X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly, among others. She is a graduate of the MA Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere program at the University of Southern California.

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Thank you to the artists & listeners!
Special thanks to CJSW.

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