Writing SOUND — Christopher Webb

‘DOMINUS VOBISCUM’, 2022

Halifax, NOva Scotia, Canada

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“The Night Of: DOMINUS VOBISCUM” ~ A critical essay by Sofia Godsoe

On Thursday, November 24th, Nova Scotian multidisciplinary artist Christopher Webb presented Dominus Vobiscum, an exhibition highlighting Christopher’s prose performed and paintings arranged with musical sounds drawn from his compositions.

I Arrived Early. My head was on a near-constant swivel as I sat awkwardly amid bustling pre-show acoustic chaos and took in the gorgeous architecture of the Cathedral Church of All Saints in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I wasn’t raised in the church and my associations with such places as these are less than intimate, but I was struck by how beautiful it was, how there was always something to look at — the organ pipes emerging from the wall like some natural geologic growth, the elaborate paintings of the saints. I felt small, but far from empty, in such an impressive space; it was clear that there was nothing arbitrary about the environment. In front of me and to the left was a puzzling little shellacked table with intricately carved legs. Atop it sat a couple of cutting boards, one round, one rectangular; atop those rested an orange and a pile of hand-knitted dish towels, respectively. I wondered who had made the towels, if Christopher had brought them from home. The orange, I knew, was connected to the citrus trees his partner planted years ago, which recently began bearing fruit. My own excitement at being there was hard to contain, but I found myself getting lost in the preparation. What was evident to me was the sense of commitment to the project binding everyone I saw together. I watched pockets of order and disorder eddy around me as the people who had worked so hard to make the night a reality performed their harried choreography. For me, this was part of the show; a private bonus I was granted privileged access to, a preliminary warmth.

Performance artist Grey Muldoon climbed the small spiral bronze-coloured staircase leading up to a small platform where there was a microphone (their feet were bare and I imagined how cold the steps must be). There, Grey performed Christopher’s “Announcements,” a selection of fragments that reminded me of being somewhere far away, surrounded by a language I did not know (not Italian for me, but Japanese). At the same time, I felt thrust into someone else’s moments, which was not an entirely unpleasant feeling. It felt like a dream where you discover that you’re living a life that does not belong to your waking self — disorienting, but refreshingly denaturalized. There were elements of improvisation, clearly. Grey had an orange and was eating it incrementally into the microphone, which immediately challenged my boundaries because having someone eat with you is so intimate and the context was so strange; the vicarious pleasure of consumption overtook me. I couldn’t tell where Grey’s decision-making as a performer and Christopher’s intention started or stopped, which was really a beautiful thing. That dynamic of interpersonal connectivity pervaded the entire show, in gazes, in gestures of trust. At a certain point, Grey descended the staircase and used a knife to cut up the orange on the curious little table, which Christopher later further divided and distributed among the speakers. By that point, I had come to be quite fond of that table and everything on it, and seeing it used felt like unexpectedly seeing an actor I recognized in a film.

Christopher was in front of me operating a projector connected to images of his paintings which refused to stay still, but instead swelled and orbited. So, while everyone was speaking or playing their instruments, you would look up and see a strawberry or a butterfly in space, zooming in and out and up and across. Although the entire collection of works in oil, acrylic, and paper on canvas were hung in the periphery of the church, it was so freeing to have the paintings ever-present and ever-moving in this way; I felt a release of pressure as I realized that I didn’t need to focus and make sense of them, I could let my eyes fall and engage where they may — on the screen, on the performers, on the effigy of Christ overhead. There was a moment, when Kye Clayton, a young Halifax rapper and producer, was performing Christopher’s “Prologue,” where I clued in to the sensory enmeshment that was underway. Kye’s voice was like a magnet and emotion reverberated through him. He stared out at us and somehow, I felt myself disappear as the stars behind him throbbed with cold life. His voice got louder and louder, the words more insistent, more frantic — Holly Arsenault’s piano uttered the kind of discordance unaccompanied by discomfort. Dr. Robert Summerby-Murray’s pipe organ sounded not so much in the ear as in the bones. And how to describe Norman Adams’ cello? It felt like a nighttime travel across the water, sending me across the vast sea of space in Christopher’s paintings. I realized that, though I consciously understood the different elements that were harmonizing, my immediate sensory functions were delightfully confused by the seemingly effortless convergence of sounds and visuals. The experience became meditative, hypnotic, synaesthetic.

With this, I was primed for Rev. Dr. Lennett J. Anderson’s reading of “And You,” where the impact of Lennett’s booming voice and purposeful movements into the aisle both enraptured and alarmed me, because I was so deliciously stupefied that the snap into awareness triggered by the proximity of a moving body sparked my electric attention. Lennett’s voice seemed to falter at moments, and there was a continuous, quiet exchange between him and Christopher which forced me to try and decipher the intentionality of the moment — was Lennett forgetting his lines? Was it on purpose? It seemed so tenderly arranged, their interaction. A conversation with Christopher later on revealed to me that my curious puzzling was the point. My participation, drawn from me like ectoplasm in a spirit photograph, implicated me in the show, made me a part of it. So too with everyone else in attendance. Christopher’s “Epilogue” began, and I couldn’t believe I was in the same room with someone like Clyde A. Wray, a veteran New Brunswick poet and playwright. His brilliantly rich, practised-yet-effortless tone created this belated chemistry with all the other performers, and with Christopher. I thought of Kye’s youthful vigorousness and I was reminded with renewed understanding how the same person who wrote the words that came from Kye’s mouth also wrote the words that came from Clyde’s. All these voices were one person and many people, creating a sense of polyphony that was impossible to ignore. As the deep cello of "Epilogue” faded, the piano began to play long, singular notes, introducing the last piece, “Amantes Amentes.” Louise Renault, I recognized her voice and it reminded me of winter weekday mornings blinking blearily into my teacup. But here, her voice was Sunday morning, when you have nowhere to be but everywhere to go, because she was speaking Christopher’s words. As citrus glided toward me on the screen, her voice was yellow, so yellow, and Holly’s piano so clear and sweet. I could taste the lemon.

The evening was beyond what I imagined it could be. Christopher was incredibly charismatic, frank, and open. I felt no pretence, just a natural exuberance emanating from him and everyone who was involved. Although Christopher would not claim to be a poet, fragmentation is one of the most unruly but rewarding modes of expression in poetry and he effectively mobilized it visually, aurally, and textually. The exhibition’s value came through in all the elements of construction operating harmoniously — the music, the physical space and acoustics, the expertly chosen voices, the exquisite painting and prose. Everyone and everything had chemistry. The chemistry was created in the air, between Christopher and the performers, the musicians; between every person speaking and sounding off in that beautiful space. I witnessed Christopher as the grounding body from which all these other voices emerged. The variety of the tones somehow converged into one voice. That was Christopher's voice, but it could have been anyone's. We all experience life and memory in a fragmentary way, which is why we are so desperate to create narratives and impose meaning. But often, it’s the fragments that matter more than the story. It’s the fragments you take home. Dominus Vobiscum was not a show that ended when I left the cathedral. It was an experience I will carry with me, nestled in my mind like a tiny seed.