Megan and Murray McMillan

Megan and Murray McMillan, The Oldest Song We Know: Installation, 2007

Megan and Murray McMillan, The Oldest Song We Know: Installation (detail), 2007

Megan and Murray McMillan, The Oldest Song We Know: Photograph 1, 2007, 26” x 39”, ed. of 3

Today our exhibition The Oldest Song We Know opens at Qbox in Athens, Greece. In conjunction with the opening in the gallery, we are hosting an online opening here on our blog, featuring the same work: three photographs, an installation, and a video. The work will only be online for the duration of the show, from Sept 11-Nov 10.

Megan and Murray McMillan, The Oldest Song We Know: Photograph 2, 2007, 20.5” x 31”, ed. of 3

Megan and Murray McMillan, The Oldest Song We Know: Photograph 3, 2007, 20.5” x 31”, ed of 3

Megan and Murray McMillan, The Oldest Song We Know: Installation, 2007

Megan and Murray McMillan, The Oldest Song We Know: Installation (detail), 2007

Megan and Murray McMillan, The Oldest Song We Know: Installation (detail), 2007

From the essay by Dana Turkovic which accompanies our current exhibition at Qbox gallery in Athens (through Nov 10)…

“The Oldest Song We Know” is undeniably, and in many complex ways, tightly linked to the current state of re-building on the island of Kea and the Parthenon’s literal and linear approach to its telling of stories, but particularly aligned with the displacement of a large portion of the friezes from Athens to London in the early 1800s by the British ambassador and antiquarian Lord Elgin. The McMillans describe the scandal of the “Elgin Marbles” as one inspiration for the piece: “it is a deconstructed narrative that exists in two places at once; between the people who experience the pieces in England and the people of Athens, as they approach the works in different ways with different readings; both a historical reading and a modern one; where narrative itself is deteriorated over time.”

Download the essay here.

Dana Turkovic is an independent curator based in St. Louis, Missouri.

Related: from The Los Angeles Times, Taking the Long View of Architecture in Athens; from The International Herald Tribune, Campaigner urges Greece to fight for Marbles for new Acropolis museum, and from The Guardian, Should we give the Parthenon marbles back?

Tomorrow, Tuesday Sept 11, when The Oldest Song We Know opens at Qbox in Athens (noon EST), we’ll simultaneously post images and exhibit the video on YouTube for anyone unable to come to the opening in Greece.

Our exhibition, The Oldest Song We Know, opens at Qbox in Athens on Tuesday, Sept 11. The exhibition features photos, a video and an installation. In the days leading up to the opening, we’ll be showcasing additional photos from the series, including the one above, here on the blog.

Read about it here on Art Daily.

The Oldest Song We Know, 2007, installation detail

Our solo exhibition, The Oldest Song We Know, opens Tuesday, Sept 11 (6-11pm) at Qbox gallery in Athens, Greece. The exhibition is the culmination of our summer residency on the island of Tzia, hosted by the gallery, and features a video, photos and an installation.

The press release for the show is now available here on Art Agenda International. If you read Greek, or want to see more images, you can also find information here, here and here. The gallery’s English-version website is here.

We’ll feature more images on the blog in the days leading up to the exhibition’s opening.

Megan and Murray McMillan
The Oldest Song We Know
curated by Dana Turkovic
September 11 – November 10, 2007

Opening: Tuesday,
September 11, 6 to 11 pm
Special visiting hours:
Saturday 8 & Monday
10 September from 12 to 8 pm

http://www.qbox.gr

Our solo exhibition, The Oldest Song We Know, opens at Qbox in Athens, Greece on Tues., Sept. 11. The show consists of photos, an installation, and the video that we made during our residency on the island of Tzia over the summer. The title of the exhibition refers to the soundtrack of the video, a rendition of the Epitaph of Seikilos, which is the oldest known complete musical composition with lyrics, dated around 200 BC.

The song is inscribed on a tombstone found in modern Turkey in the late 1800s. It’s thought that Seikilos, the songwriter, wrote it as his wife’s epitaph. The inscription reads: I am a tombstone, an icon. Seikilos placed me here as an everlasting sign of deathless remembrance.

The lyrics to the score read:

While you live, shine
Don’t suffer anything at all;
Life exists only a short while
And time demands its toll.

Our current project, created in Greece for the Qbox Gallery in Athens, is now complete. The project, titled The Oldest Song We Know, contains a video (which features the actual oldest known song, found on a Greek tombstone), three photographs and an installation. The opening is September 11 at Qbox. We’ll post final images after the opening.

Since completing the project last week, we’ve arrived back in the states and moved to Providence, RI: our new home. As soon as we get our feet on the ground, we’ll write on Providence, Boston and general East Coast art interests.

60% finished. We’re now working on a title for the work.

Here’s the installation 40% finished. The installation, at Qbox Gallery in Athens, shares the space with our projected video so one of its design restraints is to functionally block the light from the screen. Of course it won’t block it 100% so we’re trying to find a sensitive balance between darkness (for the video) and lightness (for the installation).