 – Opening on Sunday, November 22, 2026, “Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet” is the first exhibition of the artist’s work at the Parrish Art Museum.…){kind=link}
WATER MILL, NY (PNAN) – Opening on Sunday, November 22, 2026, “Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet” is the first exhibition of the artist’s work at the Parrish Art Museum. Over the course of a forty-year career, artist Cardiff (Canadian, b. 1957 in Brussels, Ontario) has been recognized for her transportive and immersive multimedia installations of audio and video walks, often made alongside her longtime collaborator George Bures Miller. This presentation comprises the 2001 sound installation, a reworking of a sixteenth-century musical composition by the English composer Thomas Tallis.
Since its creation in 2001, this showing has also been exhibited internationally, including at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2025); The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY (2024); the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2019); Switch House at Tate Modern, London (2017); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2015-16); High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2014); The Met Cloisters, New York, NY (2013); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2012); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2006); among many others.
In Cardiff’s installation, fifty-nine individually recorded voices singing “Spem in Alium” emit from forty speakers. Because Cardiff selected a version of the piece that uses children’s voices for the soprano parts, twenty-seven boys and girls joined the thirty-two adult male choristers. Like the arrangement of the choral composition, the speakers are configured in eight separate choirs, each consisting of five voices (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass). “I placed the speakers around the room in an oval so that the listener would be able to really feel the sculptural construction of the piece by Tallis,” explains Cardiff. “You can hear the sound move from one choir to another, jumping back and forth, echoing each other, and then experience the overwhelming feeling as the sound waves hit you when all of the singers are singing.”
For more detailed information on this exhibition, see: https://parrishart.org/exhibitions/janet-cardiff-the-forty-part-motet