Throughout the run of Other Arrangements, artists have activated works from the exhibition that explores the aesthetics and poetics of the performance score. The exhibition highlights the ways artists use performance scores to stretch the imagination, to invoke action and possibility.
For the opening on February 29, pianist Sofia Mycyk performed Rodney Graham’s, The School of Velocity, a work from Remai Modern’s collection being performed in Saskatoon for the first time.
In School of Velocity, Graham brings together the piano exercise of the same name with Galileo’s equation of the acceleration of falling objects. The artist’s new interpretation of the piano piece gets progressively slower, with longer and longer pauses between notes. Each sheet represents one minute in a 24-hour-long piece of music.
The inspiration for the work came from a 1978 article in Scientific American Magazine that posits a link between Galileo and music. Galileo’s father was a composer, and this musical influence and knowledge may have impacted Galileo’s experimental process and methodology.
Such references are common in Graham’s work. Over an art practice spanning five decades, he explored cultural and intellectual histories through photography, film, music, performance, and painting. His artwork pops with puns and humour.
Rodney Graham died in Vancouver in 2022. The performance of this work is an elegy to this celebrated and influential artist.
Sofia Mycyk earned her Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance degree from the University of Minnesota and has performed as a soloist with orchestras in Canada and the United States, most recently with the Stratford Symphony Orchestra, ON. Her first album, Hutsulian Watercolours, features solo piano music by Ukrainian composers. Mycyk lives and works in Saskatoon.
