James O’Callaghan is a composer and multimedia artist based in Montréal. His music, described as “very personal… with its own colour anchored in the unpredictable,” (Goethe-Institut) intersects acoustic and electroacoustic media, employing field recordings, amplified found objects, computer-assisted transcription of environmental sounds, and unique performance conditions.

James created his video Knowns specifically for Wonderhorse Emerging Arts & Music Festival.

Knowns defamiliarizes the everyday object of the chair, framing it as a sounding instrument. The piece looks at the fragility and tension of the plurality of meanings that chairs can convey, and acts as a kind of ode to the enormous weight of associations the objects sometimes carry for us.

Chairs are places where we work, where we rest, where we gather together, or set ourselves apart. They can give us comfort, authority, welcome, or take these things away from us. Empty chairs can mean different things to us than when they are sat on. So much of these things have to do with the contexts we give the chairs, but when we listen to the objects themselves, we can discover new things about them and see new beauty in them, and open ourselves up to other associations.

Knowns is a site for all of these possible associations. Particular inspirations of mine included Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual art work One and Three Chairs (1965), Åke Parmerud’s electroacoustic work Les objets obscures (1991), and The Backstreet Boys’ choreography for As Long As You Love Me (1997).

Knowns was created by assembling video improvisations of performances with an amplified wooden chair at the Woodside church in Troy, New York, courtesy of a curatorial residency offered by Gabriella Garcia. The multitudinous sounds offered by the chair are expanded, made hyper-real, or estranged, through electronic manipulation. The work was created for the 2021 Wonderhorse festival in Whitehorse, Yukon.

James O’Callaghan’s video can be found projected onto the wall of the Jenni House on Friday Sept. 3 during Wondercrawl