Born 1969 Toronto – Works and lives in London
Janice Kerbel’s feats of strategized deception through means of print type, audio recording and light are of the quality of The War of the Worlds original 1938 radio broadcast. While developing her systems of artful deception, Kerbel attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver and Goldsmiths University in London where she is currently a Reader in Fine Art. Shortly after moving to London she designed a nearly criminal master plan titled Bank Job (1999), later published as 15 Lombard Street (2000). Posing as an architectural student to gain access to Coutts & Co. (London’s most exclusive private bank) for a year and a half, she secretly studied the building to produce a detailed manual for robbing the bank. Like several of her stories, Bank Job has a telling flaw: the publishing of her plan meant that it could never be realized.
Until recently, Kerbel’s stories were woven through posters in her work Remarkable, a Frieze Art Fair Project (2007) or as radio broadcasts such as Nick Silver Can’t Sleep (2006), a 16-minute love story about a cactus for insomniacs commissioned by Artangel and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. She has also found deceptive potential in light works and social media. Composed only of stage lights, Kill the Workers! visited Chisenhale Gallery, Badischer Kunstverein and Walter Phillips Gallery in 2011. The narrative, driven purely by dramatic lighting cues tells the odyssey of one light’s efforts to be seen as an object as opposed to an illuminating device. In Kerbel’s most recent blogging project, Doug, she predicts the looming perils of the fictional character Doug. Commissioned by Common Guild in 2014 and nominated for the 2015 Turner Prize, Doug’s nine adventures were composed into an acapella score for a single, narrating voice.