Larry Mermelstein
Song-Portrait 
2017 

The Cape Breton Song-Portrait Project (in progress and ever-evolving) 

A series of "Song-Portraits" (under 3-minute video works made from excerpted interview footage) will be components for installation works and supporting events. 

Description The Cape Breton Song-Portrait Project is derived from research on the history and present-day communities of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. The project began by the artists recording the stories of the people around them, with questions reflecting their own place within communities of people “from away,” including an earlier generation of artists, dedicated Buddhist practitioners, Vietnam War-era draft evaders, and back-to-the-landers arriving between the 1960s and 1980s. This oral history project extends to people of the African Nova Scotian community, and the area's settler-colonial descendents. Interview excerpts are overlaid with ventriloquized song to create a series of "Song-Portraits," presented in a variety of ways.