Plans for Home Conjuring Unit, a work by Janice Kerbal (b.1969, Toronto) works with a range of material – including print, type, audio recording and, more recently, light – to explore notions of visibility through the inhabitation of forms that both promise and withhold the realisation of subsequent states.
Commissioned as part of Slipstream, one of several innovative new media projects (the.year.dot, Tristero, and Silicon Fen) curated specifically for the Internet. Slipstream was a short-lived internet project designed to track traffic on the World Wide Web. It aimed to use the constant online activity as a cover for a series of art pieces created by various artists. These pieces were either hidden within the content of a selected website or designed to disrupt or subvert its normal operations.
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The artists’ contributions took various forms, such as pop-up interruptions, advertised downloads, or intermittent visual disturbances. Janice Kerbal’s intervention, like the other contributions in the virtual social space, was meant to be disconcerting and imply a glitch in the system or a mysterious presence within the technology.
Kerbel has explored a recurring theme of communication (and sometimes its absence) in the form of print, performance, light and most recently sound. She was a 2015 Turner Prize nominee along with Bonnie Camplin, Nicole Wermers, and Assemble. Her recent group and solo exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial (2018); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2016); MoMA, New York (2013); The Arts Club, Chicago (2012); Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre, Canada (2012); Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany (2011); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2011); and Tate Britain, London (2010). She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2015 and was a Sobey Art Award finalist in 2006.
Plans for Home Conjuring Unit was commissioned and curated by a Film and Video Umbrella and supported by Arts Council England and Arts Council England East.
