Glendive Foley
2000

Omer Fast’s Glendive Foley is a synchronized two-channel video installation. One of the two monitors shows frontal views of various homes in Glendive, Montana, an out-of-the-way community selected by the artist because it is the nation’s smallest self-contained television market, representing a microcosm of America itself. The opposite monitor displays a grid of images of Fast vocally producing a complete soundtrack of “Foley” effects to accompany the images of the homes. Foley effects, as they are known in the radio and television industries, are ambient sounds usually recorded in a studio and later added to the main soundtrack. Through his whistling, buzzing, blowing, and hissing, Fast insinuates himself into these scenes of small-town America. “Glendive Foley is about the exchange that occurs between an individual and an environment,” Fast explains. “The work attempts to create a space that literalizes this exchange, through a complete displacement of aural phenomena from one end of the exchange to the other.”