Boscage
2019
∞ minutes
(no set duration)
Instrumentation
Fixed Media / Installation
for multiple playback devices
Notes
Boscage /ˈbäskij/ noun (countable and uncountable, plural boscages): a place set with trees or mass of shrubbery, a grove or thicket.
Peter is a member of the artist collective Banded Wilderness, a group that was commissioned by the City of Raleigh to create and install a site-specific artwork as a part of the SEEK Raleigh Festival at Dorothea Dix Park that began on June 1, 2019. Boscage remained at the park until January 11, 2020. Tucked away in a wooded area of The Grove, the work consisted of 15 sculptural trees and an open-ended, 8-channel sound component that ran continuously for the duration of the installation. Part painting, part sculpture, and part new music experience, the piece was meant to provoke a sense of wonder in regular visitors to the park, inspiring the notion that even the most familiar of places still offer undiscovered magic.
Similar to previous installations, Peter composed a series of fixed media tracks for this piece that was played through multiple devices throughout the site. Each track focused on one synthetic tone with various timbral colors added including the sounds of birds, the human voice, and chimes. Each device was set to loop all of the tracks in random order creating a continuously evolving sound field. To add to the magical atmosphere, this aleatoric music emanated from within the sculptural trees themselves with speakers hidden, wires buried, and no visible power source.
A distant humming catches your ear as you walk along the tree line at Dorothea Dix Park. Moving into the trees, you find yourself surprised at the appearance of totem-like saplings. Unlike the old growth oaks and pines you expected, these “trees” are brightly colored, striped, and are the origin of the music that drew you in.
Brightest pink, black, white, blue, vermillion, yellow-green, turquoise, and fuschia; the colors of the saplings flash brightly against the deep browns and vivid greens of the wooded backdrop. Music is heard emanating from within each sapling. Single notes, warm and inviting, harmonize with wind-like whispers. The trees seem to be speaking to one another through a lost language; an abstract dialogue of histories. At the center of the “sapling clearing” the sound is all around you, and within the confines of an urban park, you find yourself in a place that can’t help but have been touched by magic; a pocket world only recently rediscovered.
Images from the Installation
Visit BandedWilderness.art for more information about the project and the artists involved.