Janet Cardiff Muriel Lake Incident 1999, Courtesy of the Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaundengo per L'arte, Turin. Photograph courtesy of the Artist and Luhring Augustine
Janet Cardiff Muriel Lake Incident 1999
Courtesy of the Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaundengo per L'arte, Turin. Photograph courtesy of the Artist and Luhring Augustine © Janet Cardiff
Janet Cardiff has gained international recognition for her 'walks', in which participants are led through a building or an area of a city by an audioguide or while watching the screen of a camcorder. These walks reference key themes in Cardiff's work such as architecture, the cinematic and the structure of narrative. Shifting between past and present, memory and fact, Cardiff's stories blur reality with the participant's own hopes and dreams. These themes are also brought together in this piece, The Muriel Lake Incident, the title referring to a lake in the artist's native Canada.

Inside a simple plywood box the artist has constructed a period cinema in miniature. On the small screen a complex story unfolds. Stylistically film noir and set in midwestern USA, the film presents the viewer with almost stereotypical motifs and characters, such as a gunshot, a ringing telephone and a cowboy. When the viewer puts on the headphones, apparently to listen to the soundtrack, they are virtually transported into the miniature space, sitting in the cinema with a female companion. Already mid-conversation this woman relates her dreams and anxieties, and it quickly becomes obvious that there are coincidences between the stories on screen and off.

Using literary and cinematic forms Cardiff explores memory, fantasy and contemporary cultural ritual. Playing with scale and using high quality audio technology Cardiff investigates the viewer's personal relationship to the physical environment, to their own bodies and to each other. In The Muriel Lake Incident the very public experience of being in a cinema becomes a personal one, as the entire effect is created in the mind of the viewer.

Video and mixed media (one of an edition of three)
Actors: Jim Manis, George Bures Miller and Janet Cardiff
Produced with the support of the International Istanbul Biennial, Department of External Affairs and International Trade of Canada, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, The University of Lethbridge and thanks to many friends and family members for the crowd sound effects.