Hard Rain Project

Mark Edwards' Hard Rain project consists of drastic photos of environmental problems, each captioned with a line from Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's A'Gonna Fall.  The project is shown in outside displays, on temporary hoardings, pinned to railings – in the public domain.  The Hard Rain project has already been shown in 50 cities around the world, none in Canada however.  Dylan's Hard Rain is made, here, to anticipate today's accelerating disasters. For example, 'Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world' underlines a tsunami image.  This might seem obvious except that Dylan's 1962 lyrics were generally thought to refer to Cold War nuclear annihilation.  This reinscription of the lyrics by way of images, plus the tune itself making one inevitably sing the captions, prevents the passive gaze: the tune leaps into the brain, with a kind of synaesthesia the photos rewrite the lyric.  Each line links a contemporary fact – deforestation in Haiti perhaps, with the global inevitablility of disaster.  The line brings it home.