hard ground / long road

hard ground / long road
Masha Kouznetsova
October 19-29, 2022

Satellite Project Space
121 Dundas St
Wednesday-Friday 2-7pm, Saturday 12-5pm
Opening reception: Friday, October 21, 5-7pm

Masha Kouznetsova records her immediate environment and transitions between places using pinhole photography, mark-making, found and handmade objects, and audio tapes. Through these recording processes, she explores her relationship to migration, time, place and no-placeness, distance, and wayfinding. hard ground / long road is an installation of sound, sculpture, and works on paper that are based on the sound recordings from the artist’s drive between San Francisco, California and London, Ontario August 2-19, 2021. During the seventeen days on the road, Masha Kouznetsova recorded radio noise (AM, FM picket-fencing) as well as her voice describing the environment surrounding the road at the times when she could not stop to take a photo.

The radio and voice recordings were transferred to a found cassette tape, then cut-up and spliced by hand to create an aleatoric composition titled california road / bach cut-up. The california road / bach cut-up tape runs through two tape players simultaneously. Each time the tape is played through the two recorders, the iron oxide (the sound) disintegrates, resulting in increasingly noisier and unpredictable. The installation incorporates cassette tapes and speakers that the artist found on the side of the road in San Francisco and London. The cassette tape insert is a double-sided intaglio print produced from a hard-ground copper plate etching. The text in the print is the log of her recordings from this drive.

california road / bach cut-up will be activated by the artist for gallery visitors on October 21, October 22, October 28, and October 29.

www.kouznetsova.com
instagram: @mashakouznetova