TIM FEENEY

Dowsing / Collóireacht, 2025

Information kit

FilmFreeway project page for film screenings: https://filmfreeway.com/projects/3638420

Narrative

Ten repetitive sonic interventions within the eroded landscapes of the Burren, County Clare, Ireland.

These occur at sites of local “anti-monuments:” a kilometers-long, natural limestone pavement high above Galway Bay; stone farm walls and remnants of circular structures on hillsides; cairns near a shoreline; a field of glacial boulders interrupted by a road smashed from the surrounding stone formations, in forced public work by the starving during the Great Hunger of 1845 to 1852. These structures speak to both the passage of geologic time, and the care and efforts of human survival beginning in the Neolithic period and tended through the present, though local history at each site may be lost, or unrecorded.

These are introduced in title cards in English, italicized as would be a term in a language foreign to the observer, and in Irish in plain font, as would be in an observer’s native language.

From one perspective, a sonic divining or physical research into the properties of land, space, light, and time in these locations; from another, an attempt as an “Irish-American” to reckon with language, archaeology, and history felt as formative but inarticulable without lived context.

After a point, you can only ask the stone so many questions, and sometimes you can only hear your own voice in response.

Option 1: Film screening

Version A

Single screen, 2.39x1

Stereo or 3.1 sound

1h 38m 30s

Image via theater projection screen, flat-screen monitor, or projected on any available surface. Sound via any available theatrical system, or configured to available gallery speakers.

Version B

Double screen, 2.39x1

Stereo, 3.1, or 4-channel sound

46m

Image via flat-screen monitors, or projected on any available surface, with channels next to one another on a single wall, or on adjacent walls bounded by one corner. Sound via any available theatrical system, or configured to available gallery speakers.

Option 2: Gallery installation, looping

One to ten screens or projection surfaces, as available and in in any spatial configuration.

2.39x1 if projected; 16x9 if displayed on multiple tablets or flat-screen monitors. Sound configurable for available sound system, or any number of speakers or headphones at each projection.

Biography

Tim Feeney performs, composes, and improvises sounds and images in and for forests and waterfronts, investigating unstable sound and duration. He appears in bookstores and basements with Sarah Hennies and Greg Stuart as the trio Meridian; in galleries and libraries with Vic Rawlings and Annie Lewandowski; in living rooms and warehouses with Clay Chaplin and Davy Sumner; in tunnels and train stops with Cody Putman and Cassia Streb as the trio Tasting Menu; in colleges and museums with Andrew Raffo Dewar, Holland Hopson, and Jane Cassidy; on recordings for Intakt, Black Truffle, Rhizome.s, Caduc, Full Spectrum, Sedimental, and Marginal Frequency; and in the occasional festival or concert hall with Anthony Braxton and Ingrid Laubrock.
 
Tim builds sound and video installations exploring the acoustic properties and geographies of neglected spaces. His recent work has been presented by festivals at locations including Silo City, an abandoned grain silo and shipping complex along the river in Buffalo, New York; Boston’s Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, a preserved steam pumping station that processed the city’s drinking water; and the Bernheim Research Forest, outside Louisville, Kentucky; as well as by more formal events at the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans; the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida; the Audubon Center of Debs Park, Los Angeles; the Denver Underground Film Festival; Festival International Musique Actuelle Victoriaville; Roma Short Film Festival; CICA Museum, South Korea; and the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.
 
He is a faculty member in percussion, improvisation, composition, and experimental sound practices at the California Institute of the Arts.

Artist statement

I am drawn to deceptively simple materials, physical and sonic: the sound of two stones scraped slowly across one another; the reverberant impact of these stones struck hard together in a resonant concrete building; the change that results if a person walks slowly around that building while striking the stones together; the memory of pulling these stones out of a river on a trip twelve years in the past. The act of finding these materials, their resonances, and their arrangement in time and space, makes them incredibly personal, and they become talismans marking specific times and places in my life.

My work uses ideas from these materials in activating resonances, physical and imaginary, of their surroundings. I am reminded of the effect achieved by the artist Dan Flavin, in which a small number of green fluorescent light tubes, for example, illuminate a darkened, enclosed concrete environment. Shadows and reflections highlight the surrounding walls, or generate illusions of larger or smaller spaces, and participants experience shadows and afterimages in complementary rose colors when closing their eyes or turning away from the lights.

I am after an analogous aural, visual, and memory response, where a participant in one location in place and time experiences an afterimage of another. Indoors and out, my work introduces sound and image alongside that of the natural environment and its human interlopers, offering participants an opportunity to be present inside the work, and the ability to create their own senses of local time as they pass through and encounter it. Observers engage the physical reality of the environment, as well as a larger imagined, possibly apocryphal, topography and conjectured history of a site built from their observations.