The Night Has a Thousand Eyes: Keith Piper and Ramona Ramlochand

The three installations in this exhibition refer to the interconnections between cultures in our post-colonial world. The artists reflect on how this condition impacts on identity. They exploit the sensory overload effect of new digital technology.

Ramona Ramlochand’s photographic installation Journey to Nowhere is a construction of old wooden doors and back-lit transparencies containing images of a jungle in Zaine and the Silver Pagoda in Cambodia. These seductive scenes of exotic places ultimately lead nowhere. Keith Piper’s video projection, The Exploded City, is an elaborate interweaving of images and language, both spoken and written, that is a skeptical comment on notions of brave new worlds and virtual cities.

The Night Has a Thousand Eyes is a collaboration between the two artists. Gallery visitors are drawn into a space of dramatic darkness by an enticing yet disturbing computer-generated sound montage where two video projections are encountered. The grainy black and white footage from a surveillance camera in Devonshire Mall contrasts with a lush, computer-enhanced collage of images from exotic places. The viewer makes connections between the familiar and the unknown, between here and there. This work provokes memories of places, some immediate, some imagined, and raises questions about how we experience place in such a chaotic world.

Keith Piper was born in Malta and now lives in London, England where, since the early 1980s, he has produced elaborate multimedia works concerned with Black diasporan experience. Montreal artist, Ramona Ramlochand, was born in Guyana and bases many of her installations on her world travels.