interdisciplinary performance installation merging dance, music and olfaction, 2024.

Creators: Carla Bengtson, in collaboration with choreographer Darion Smith, composer Juliet Palmer, and perfumer Dannielle Sergent
Presenter: Oregon Contemporary, Portland Biennial, April-August, 2024

Through multi-sensory creative forms Other Nations enacts the voicing, sensing, signifying life worlds of other creatures while shining a light on our own animal-related modes of being. We are particularly intrigued by ways of seeing, sounding, hearing, moving and smelling that slip the perceiver and the perceived between visibility and invisibility. In the bigger picture, we are curious to see whether we can learn to navigate through the noise of human existence to a deeper attentiveness to other living beings.

Other Nations: video, 2024

Dance by Darion Smith. Videography by Steven Myat. Vocal score by Juliet Palmer in collaboration with Lieke van der Voort, Andrea Kuzmich, Jackson Welchner and Elizabeth Lima. Recording engineer: Jean Martin.

Choreographer Darion Smith and composer Juliet Palmer invite ground squirrel, coyote and rattlesnake to flow through the human body as movement and vocalization. Moving then sounding, the singers responded to three choreographic sketches by Darion Smith. Unaware of the animals they were channeling, their voices betray an intuitive, embodied connection to the more-than-human. Dancing between traffic, grass, concrete, and water, Smith underscores the illusory separation between human and more-than-human beings, nature and culture.

Photos: Mario Gallucci

interdisciplinary performance installation merging dance, music and olfaction, 2020.

Every Word Was Once An Animal merges art, science, dance, music, and olfaction. An ongoing collaboration between visual artist Carla Bengtson, composer Juliet Palmer, choreographer Darion Smith and video artist and ceramicist Jessie Rose Vala.

Every Word was Once an Animal explores the overlapping forces of nature and culture between humans, animals, and language. The interdisciplinary exhibition blends Bengtson’s playful investigations into the lifeworlds of nonhuman animals with choreographer Darion Smith’s interest in embodied language, composer Juliet Palmer’s investigations into the material possibilities and constraints of human and nonhuman utterance, and artist Jessie Rose Vala’s evocations of the intimate relationship between sculptural form and the mythic mind. Inspired by the research of Dr. Emilia Martins (Arizona State University) on the group learned, gestural language of Western fence lizards.

Presenter: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, Oregon, March-December, 2020.

Funding: JSMA Academic Support Grant, the University of Oregon’s College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Art + Design, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, Spring Creek Projects’ Long-term Ecological Reflections Program, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Center for Art Research.

sound installation, Singing River, Pan Am Path, Pedestrian Bridge, Lower Don Trail, Toronto, July 4-5 2015.

Transducers applied to the pedestrian bridge transform it into a vibrating loudspeaker, singing the river’s Anishinaabemowin name to the most constricted and polluted section of the waterway.

Original song for the Wonscotonach River composed by Marie Gaudet and performed by the First Nations School of Toronto girls singing group.

Wonscotonach has been translated by linguist Basil Johnson as “burning bright point or peninsula” or a point bright with fire, perhaps referring to the peninsula near the mouth of the Don (later the Toronto islands).

“When you think about it, a lot of these songs came from the women who did the laundry along the riverside. This song came to me when I was in the laundromat. I was in there alone, listening to the swishes of the water and the humming of the machines. And I was thinking of another song that I really liked and thinking that, geez, I’d like to make a really nice pretty song like that one. And so that is how the song came to me.” — Marie Gaudet, on composing the Wonscotonach River Song

Creative team: artistic director Juliet Palmer & sound artist Christopher Willes
Additional voices: Regent Park School of Music

sound installation, Singing River, Pan Am Path, Belleville Underpass, Lower Don Trail, Toronto, July 4-5 2015.

Diagnostic ultrasound recordings transport the listener along the body’s inner rivers. Entering the tunnel, we are immersed in a dynamic audio map of blood flow: from the tips of the fingers, through the abdominal region, to the head and brain.

Research work in Dr. Peter Burns’ laboratory at the University of Toronto makes use of Doppler ultrasound to measure the dynamic flow of blood, its pressures and the resistance of blood vessels themselves. Ultrasound imaging of blood flow can provide an audible indicator of health or illness.

Exiting the tunnel, listen for the sound of the river. What obstacles does the river face? What are the pressures and resistances it must overcome?

Creative team: composer Juliet Palmer, sound artist Christopher Willes & Sunnybrook scientist Dr. Peter Burns

sound installation 1998.

Commissioner: Mercer Union
Premiere: Mercer Union Gallery, Toronto, Canada, May 15-June 20, 1998.
Thanks: Martin Arnold, Steve Bishop, Sam Bishop-Green, Nicholas Brooke, Allison Cameron, Ruth Caston, Millie Chen, Ann Christie, Christian Christie, Sasha Lutz-Winkler, Barbara Milewski, Eliot Palmer, James Rolfe, Nicholas Scott Rolfe, John Sherlock, Evelyn Von Michalofski, Todd Winkler and Mary Wright.

Program note:
A Guided Viewing hijacks the gallery audio-guide and reworks it into a face-to-face encounter between viewer and ‘artwork’. Questioning the idea of an authoritative voice, A Guided Viewing presents instead a polyphony of voices, each equally insistent.

CD/sound installation/radio broadcast 1995.

Commissioner: Artspace Gallery
Funder: Creative New Zealand
Premiere: Artspace Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, August 29-September 22, 1995.
Radio Broadcast: Concert FM (NZ)and ABC’s The Listening Room (Australia)
Text: Josh Lacey
Program note:

Miasma is about the weather. Miasma is about the remote chance of getting what you want.

Miasma is a multi-track work for two compact disc players, mute weather channel T.V. and living room. Utilizing the random shuffle feature of two domestic CD players, twenty short dialogues by English writer Josh Lacey combine with forty-four music tracks in an endlessly changing remix. The dialogues use meteorological language to describe broader concerns, their randomization reflecting the chaos and unpredictability of our relationship to the weather itself.