Amalia Pica: ears to speak of: The Power Plant, Toronto

The nature of language, semiotic systems, metaphor, and the shaping of thought through communication has been an ongoing thread in Amalia Pica’s work. Antiquated and analog systems of technology are of interest to Pica due to their “physicality”—an ontological proximity to the user or the recorded object. Her work has previously addressed both verbal and nonverbal modes of communication and the translation that takes place between ideas and objects, artist and audience. She has also explored the role of communication in the public sphere, engaging with the material mechanisms and relations of power that allow one to speak.

For her exhibition ears to speak of at The Power Plant, Amalia Pica developed Ears (2017), a new work, which continues her engagement with the failures and impossibilities of communication and obsolete technologies. The artist created monumental cardboard reconstructions of acoustic radars, also referred to as “listening ears”, found in Denge, Kent in the UK. These devices were built along the coast of England between the 1920s-1930s. Designed to pre-empt aerial attacks by detecting the sound of incoming aircraft, these radars were quickly outmoded, due to the rapid evolution of aircraft and radar technologies. Now the structures stand as ruins, monuments to failure. Pica re-activated them in the context of The Power Plant, which is located at Toronto’s Harbourfront, and is enveloped by the sound of aircraft taking off and landing at the neighbouring airport. She previously created Acoustic Radar in Cardboard (2012), another precursor to radar technology from World War I, to, “make an image about listening, rather than making a functioning device.” By rendering these outmoded technologies in cardboard—a material which absorbs sound—Pica highlights the uselessness and ephemeral quality of the structures. But the work also evokes the question: if thought and space are created through articulation, what are the potentialities in failure, and how can the subjectivity of interpretation be productive?

The exhibition at The Power Plant also features works from Pica’s In Praise of Listening (2016) series; large-scale sculptures of hearing aids rendered in marble, granite and soapstone. At the heart of these devices is the active intention to make listening possible on a personal level. By reproducing the devices in a medium that both monumentalizes and renders them mute, Pica makes visible the multitude of ways that humans attempt to communicate more effectively with one another, even as we seem to grow increasingly reluctant or unable to do so.