This selection of works showcases remarkable single channel videos made by Canadians in recent years. The five selected works present a spectrum of creative strategies: endurance performance, appropriated footage, personal address to the camera and the incorporation of mechanisms of popular culture. Some works consist of a single take. Others contain hundreds of cuts. Often performing, shooting and editing the works themselves, the artists’ presence is undeniable in each piece; yet sometimes the artist is visible and sometimes he or she is craftily shrouded. Some enact characterizations, some perform choreographed gestures, some use their corporeal shell as a tool of measurement. But within the arc of this program, all works share one commonality. Each artist consciously positions his body within the structure of the video, right under the surface. With each work the artist’s place shifts, and with each work, their presence is distinctly experienced.
Heather Keung’s Handstand presents us with the artist enacting a simple, yet difficult physical task. The set and performance are stripped down; she’s literally bare, her skin bathing in the afternoon sunlight. No props are visible - just the artist, a concrete sidewalk and a brick wall. The work she has assigned herself seems easy at first: holding a handstand as long as possible. Slowly, as time passes and holding the posture becomes more taxing, the effort becomes apparent on the artist’s face. Her physical faculties are being drawn upon quickly, used up before our eyes.
The artist is distracted by a sound, looks sideways, then labours her head back to face us. A shaft of light appears against the brick wall: a cloud has passed. As these small, discrete moments occur, we become aware that the seconds are unfolding. Her abdominal muscles start to twitch with exertion and soon she rolls forward out of the pose, spent. Though Keung simply places herself within the frame, and performs, she is not a performance artist in this work. The performance act is a physical endurance and the aesthetic is sparse, creating a work that - for the artist - is modest but not simple. The work is a document of a performance by an artist: her body performing a feat of strength.
worthless human by Jeremy Bailey also complicates the notion of performance by artists by introducing smoke and mirrors, then revealing the person behind. The work opens to a dark space inhabited by an ethereal, otherworldly being. Glowing in orange fire, this creature hovers within the frame, taunting us, the viewer. “Worthless human….you’re pathetic. I’ll eat your brains for breakfast!” it says in a deep, gravelly voice, twirling a weapon threateningly. The berating continues, but the image lightens and reveals a slender, lanky young man gripping a broom like a battleaxe. The layers of video effects over this image have been lifted and we see the artist, awkwardly twisting and turning in front of a green-screened studio wall.
worthless human was inspired by Raza Ghyslain, a Canadian high school student unwittingly made famous for a video he made of himself imitating the Star Wars character Darth Maul in November 2002. Raza’s impromptu performance cassette was found by a fellow student, encoded to a digital format and uploaded to a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, making it one of the most downloaded videos worldwide. Known as the ‘Star Wars Kid’ in Canadian culture and international media, Raza was reported to have suffered much embarrassment as the entertainment value of the video came from the humour of his lack of grace and athletic prowess.
In the case of worthless human, the audience is brought in to meet the artist within his own space – the studio. We see the artist thrashing ridiculously, kicking the air, and nearly smashing a chandelier with his 'weapon'. The man behind the curtain is revealed. The removal of the snazzy audio and video effects also unveils the tongue-in-cheek setup of Bailey’s video: pithy choreography and a seemingly slapdash set, lighting, and costume. In the position of the protagonist, Bailey also reveals himself - from mysterious, frightening being to denuded, dorky media artist. We’ve been graciously invited to Nerd-dom.
Daniel Cockburn’s Metronome features the artist in the primary role on a bizarre personal quest: he tries to maintain a steady beat for an extended period of time. Pounding his chest at a regular pace, the artist attempts to make it through the day keeping cadence with this chosen rhythm of 144 beats per minute. The artist is driven to unlock the mysteries of order. He is aiming to discover what the lowest common denominator is for this beat, and all others that exist in our world.
Tying his own performance to Hollywood cinema, Cockburn hypothesizes about the effects of devoted moviegoing on his psyche. He speculates that the visual and auditory rhythms of film have, over time, affected him adversely. Underlying this individual examination is a deep Canadian response to the unending flow of images from our southern neighbour, the United States of America.
Above all, Metronome, is about oneself and one’s universe; it unravels that horrifying and very personal moment when one has a suspicion about the world and worries that he or she might be wrong, but worse, suspects that he or she is right. Cockburn addresses the unsavory yet very human task of questioning one’s own opinions. This all takes place on camera, with the artist in the position of protagonist, creating a very personal and vulnerable work.
Patriotic is the first collaborative work by Canadian artist Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay and French artist Pascal Lievre. The artists tackle the language of anti-terrorism with humour and song by taking the infamous US-American Patriot Act address given by George W. Bush as their source. These historical words are set to the musical score of Canadian songstress Celine Dion’s "My Heart Will Go On" creating an equally disarming and alluring video. The artists, dressed in military gear, sing brightly about acceptable investigatory measures. Animated text blocks of Bush’s speech streak diagonally across the image, functioning like karaoke subtitles: the audience can sing along. The words and the performers seem to frame one another, mutually and equally commanding attention.
Both Nemerofsky Ramsay and Lievre have a history of including themselves in their own works, and this first collaboration between them is a seductive combination of their styles. The marriage of Bush’s speech with Dion’s smash hit from the Hollywood blockbuster Titanic reveal poignant and frightening relationships between these two iconic expressions of popular culture. The artists' polished personae, with their array of bedazzled authoritarian uniforms, positions of salute, and supportive, confident expressions complete this cheeky propaganda video.
Aleesa Cohene is a gatherer, a culler. With READY TO COPE she binds together many narratives, though unlike the other artists in this program, none are her own creation. She has gathered hundreds of images from cinema, self-help videos, and instructional tapes from the late seventies to the late eighties and assembled them into a collage of muted tones, pre-famous stars, and outdated hairstyles. As the story begins, there seems to be both one character and many. Building tension through archival and appropriated imagery such as shots of hands covering up ears and eyes, instructions on pill-taking, and a series of short bathtub scenes, Cohene reveals an underlying cinematic narrative of preparation and preparedness.
We are pulled slowly into a series of shots of crowds looking skyward and people in freefall, their arms and legs flailing. This new use of old footage unsettlingly echoes the media’s images of the September 11th attacks. How much of this is her editing style and how much are we the audience, piecing this together? These snippets are all from different sources, yet by splicing them from their source, re-ordering them and adding a soundtrack, a familiar and painful visual narrative is referenced and marked upon by our collective filmic memory. We’re watching these fellow beings preparing for impact, and death. Does this reflect a Canadian desire to be ready to cope? Cohene’s use of music is important. She chooses grand tunes: notable contemporary post-rock sagas dramatically sweeping from quiet to loud. A booming crescendo of explosions darkly leads us to chilling finale - the shots for which may or may not be closing finale shots within their original context.
This piece strikes a deep chord in our recent memories of crisis - yet all this source material has been repurposed and at least twenty years old. Cohene has chosen all found material from the decade after her birth in 1976. Using her own life as the criteria for selecting the source material she’s used, READY TO COPE assembles a pre-9-11 picture of security, leading us to ask the question, How has the way we see ‘terror’ changed since we were twenty years younger? How has the depiction of crisis shifted since the events of September 11th?
Cohene uses her body as the measuring stick against which culture is metered and selected. Keung uses her body as a measurement of itself, of its own resources. Bailey debunks the myth of the performer through his choreography and editing. Cockburn asks earnest questions about himself and his world on camera. Nemerofsky Ramsay and Lievre employ their bodies, voices and video techniques to challenge western icons.
In each case, the artist has positioned him or herself within the structure of their video. The use of the self as materia prima comes from Canadian video art’s long relationship to performance and considerations around the relationship of the human body to the camera. The use of the body in video art could seem outmoded, but these artists have created vignettes that have individual examinations, poignant opinions, provocative values, and personal challenges. And in using their own bodies, they have given a face to the contemporary Canadian psyche.
Recent Canadian Video Shorts was presented by curator Alissa
Firth-Eagland as part of the Summer Light City Contemporary
Art Festival by the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art
at MUU Gallery, Helsinki, Finland in 2006. The program featured
new video works by artists Jeremy Bailey, Daniel Cockburn,
Aleesa Cohene, Heather Keung, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay &
Pascal Lievre.
|
