MOVING IMAGES

×

1 of 10

Expand

"The Named and the Unnamed"

Rebecca Belmore, "The Named and the Unnamed" (2002) A visceral response to the horror of years of disappearing and murdered women on Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, Rebecca Belmore puts herself in this picture, a common method through much of her video, photography, and installation work. The technological underpinnings of Belmore’s highly political work are impressive, captivating the senses and serving content that is elemental and symbolic.

×

2 of 10

Expand

"Science Fiction"

Nathalie Melikian, "Science Fiction" (2007) There are common themes in the projected works of Nathalie Melikian and those of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, particularly in their investigations into the roles of perception and imagination in our consumption of artistic and cultural practice. In Melikian’s small, model cinemas, viewers are given a complete film experience without film. Instead, cards like modernized silent film titles flash on the screen, briefly describing scenes, and playing on our collective memory of the popular movie-going experience. Recognizable sound-track tropes play on loops, further prodding our memories of kitschy, mass-consumed sci fi culture.

×

3 of 10

Expand

"Light Bulbs"

Murray Favro, "Light Bulbs" (1970) This projection piece is part of a 1970 series that all took everyday objects — a washing machine, a table — as their subjects. Favro built 3-D white forms in the shapes of the objects, then projected images of the real objects on the forms, creating a multi-layered sense of perception. “The relationship between the object and the projection has something to do with the way we see the world,” Fischer says about this work.

×

4 of 10

Expand

"Playhouse"

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, "Playhouse" (1997) Masters of using binaural sound to dislocate viewers from the reality of what they’re seeing in installation, Cardiff and Bures Miller are known for creating hidden, closed off worlds that engage the senses. Playhouse is one in a series of late-1990s works that played off the experience of performance and spectacle — theatre, circus, cinema. In this one, the viewer sits in an enclosed space, watching a projected video of an opera singer within a miniature opera house, while voices from inside the theatre comment on and distract from the scene. The concepts behind this work, and the 1999 installation The Muriel Lake Incident, can trace directly to the assured, groundbreaking work of the duo’s Venice Biennale project The Paradise Institute (2001).

×

5 of 10

Expand

"Projections"

Krzysztof Wodiczko, "Projections" (1980 – 1988) Wodiczko’s Projections series created a mass audience for this type of work, mounting slide and video projections onto grand public facades and monuments around the world, underscoring the role of architecture and public sculpture in our collective memories and giving them newly applied layers of meaning. One of Wodiczko’s most remarkable projection works, The Tijuana Project (2001), publicly bore witness to the suffering of the young Mexican women who work in bordertown maquiladoras.

×

6 of 10

Expand

"Two Generators"

Rodney Graham, "Two Generators" (1984) This first film by the Vancouver-based master of media (photography, music, video, installation), was soon followed by a prolific outpouring of films responding to our perceptions of popular culture and cinematic stereotypes, which often connected deeply to the artist’s love of music. In Two Generators, a night shot of Vancouver’s Gold Creek is slowly illuminated with diesel-generated studio lights. The sound of the buzzing industrial lighting soon overtakes the natural sound of the rushing water. Projections also includes the 1994 short film Halcion Sleep, in which the artist is filmed snoozing under the influence of sleeping pills in the back seat of a car as he’s driven around Vancouver.

×

7 of 10

Expand

"The Named and the Unnamed"

Rebecca Belmore, "The Named and the Unnamed" (2002) A visceral response to the horror of years of disappearing and murdered women on Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, Rebecca Belmore puts herself in this picture, a common method through much of her video, photography, and installation work. The technological underpinnings of Belmore’s highly political work are impressive, captivating the senses and serving content that is elemental and symbolic.

×

8 of 10

Expand

"Waiting for High Water"

Jana Sterbak, "Waiting for High Water" (2005) Potentially merely whimsical, this second in a series of works involving Stanley, a Jack Russell terrier uses video and projection to deeply alter our perception of the world. This is the second of Sterbak’s “dog’s-eye-view” pieces — the first made by attaching a miniature camera to Stanley as he roamed the bank of the St. Lawrence River. Waiting for High Water (presented at the Venice Biennale in 2003) raises the stakes, capturing Stanley’s experience through three small cameras and projecting the results simultaneously, as he travels through Venice at high tide.

×

9 of 10

Expand

"Little Walk"

Michael Snow, "Little Walk" (1964) Using his iconic Walking Woman motif (which he would use throughout the 1960s in paintings, sculptures and installations), this was one of two short, experimental films Snow made in 1964. Other short films made through the mid-1960s would lead directly to Snow’s film, Wavelength, a breakthrough in avant-garde projection-based artwork that consisted of the appearance of a single, continuous, perishingly slow camera zoom onto various everyday actions onscreen. It was a triumph in the emerging aesthetic of minimalism.

×

10 of 10

Expand

"Overture"

Stan Douglas, "Overture" (1986). Courtest the artist and David Zwirner, NY.

Prev

Next

MOVING IMAGES

The MacKenzie Art Gallery unspools the best in Canadian projection-based art.

BY Jill Sawyer

The film opens with a grainy, flickering black-and-white shot of a train track in the Rocky Mountains, the camera following the line as it precariously balances itself high on a mountainside, disappearing in and out of tunnels. The camera has been mounted on the front of a train, filming a moving picture that would have been a novelty when it was shot, in the earliest days of film at the turn of the century. As the film continues on an endless, seven-minute loop, forever circling into tunnels and out again, a seemingly disconnected voiceover reads from the first paragraph of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

Overture, made in 1986, was Vancouver artist Stan Douglas’ first film loop installation, and it became the launching point for a series of increasingly complex and conceptually daring works in the same vein. It forms one of the vital links in the development of contemporary Canadian projection-based art at the MacKenzie Art Gallery February 7 to April 26. Organized by the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto’s Hart House, Projections is curated by Barbara Fischer, recent winner of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award in Visual Art for outstanding curatorial practice.

Fischer began with the idea of the form and technology of projection intrinsically informing the content — work that is as much about how we watch as it is about what we see. She was well-versed in the contributions that Canadian contemporary artists had made in this medium, and the remarkable success artists such as Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Stan Douglas, and Michael Snow had achieved internationally with experimental and innovative techniques and concepts.

“There are a significant number of works associated with conemporary art in Canada that explore the moving image and projection,” Fischer says. “They hadn’t been put together in one exhibition before, though they had been recognized internationally.”

Fischer began with work from the mid-1960s, with Michael Snow’s Little Walk (1964), a three-minute film designed to be projected on a flat screen cut out in the figure of a woman’s body. Among the earliest work in the show, she includes Murray Favro’s Light Bulbs and Still Life (The Table), both from 1970. She cites Snow’s Two Sides to Every Story (1974) as being emblematic of the type of projection work being done in this early era.

The viewer walks around the screen, which portrays the front and back of a scene simultaneously in a feat of reality-bending illusion. “It’s the first work that takes as its subject the cinematic screen itself,” Fischer says. “It looks at the way film is projected in space, and makes you look at that space.” Two Sides to Every Story makes the viewer consider the physical reality of the projected image — where does it go, and what is behind it?

Favro was playing with similar tricks of perception at the same time. His 1970 projections created a veneer of unreality on the most mundane objects, giving viewers an off-balance sense of illusion. In fact, many of the experimental forms in projection at that time were cerebrally playful explorations into perception, illusion, and the manipulation of the seeing eye.

There were many fundamental and experimental reasons that the genre of film and projection began to explode in Canadian contemporary art during the 1960s and 70s, not the least of which was the cost of the experimentation. Film and cameras were becoming more accessible, and the filmed image was no longer seen as something that lived only in the realm of the cinematic.

“People began to think about film as a medium that could be shown in a gallery,” Fischer says. “Canadian artists have always been particularly interested in new media, and an exploration of this new type of technology made artists look at what the implications of it were, on a philosophical and conceptual level.”

It wasn’t long before the experimentation took on a larger scale, and was easily adapted from small, personal works to wide-reaching political statements. The work of Krzysztof Wodiczko is groundbreaking on this level. Fischer has included a series of representations of his large-scale Projections series in this show, which she describes as having the “power of projection as political means.” Wodieczko’s subversion of grand public spaces to carry his projected words and images has taken political messages and creative concepts to huge public audiences.

Representing a more personal political message, Rebecca Belmore’s The Named and the Unnamed reflects fiercely on missing and murdered women and children, from Vancouver’s Eastside to the massacre at Wounded Knee. Belmore often puts herself in her video projections, representational of her focus on the woman’s body and self, and recording the integral performance aspects of many of her installations. Belmore’s 2005 Venice Biennale piece, Fountain — a powerful meditation on water, land, and the body — represented a seamless stitching together of her performative artwork and a very sophisticated video technique.

In more recent work, Canadian artists have been particularly interested in the experience of film and video, and how perception can be altered through technology. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are particularly adept at bending viewers’ perception through manipulation of video and sound. Cardiff began more than 15 years ago, experimenting with the experience of sound-enhanced walks. Since then, she and Bures Miller have been working with poking at perception through sound and sight, building model cinemas and opera houses and creating binaural soundscapes that simultaneously recreate the full theatre experience.

The idea of distilling the experience of watching, and how it affects memory, imagination and perception, is integral to Fischer’s intent with Projections. “Film in this exhibition is not looked at so much for its content,” she says. “It’s about how the experience of watching affects us as a whole, and how it affects our feelings.” Since the exhibition began touring, Fischer has garnered praise for the variety the show represents in methods of seeing — it doesn’t just present film, video, and projections in static forms. The viewer is fully engaged in all different forms of seeing and experiencing the work.

Many of the works are in immersive environments, whether they’re multi-screened experiences like Jana Sterbak’sWaiting for High Water, the mini-opera house of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Playhouse, or the mind-bending, how-did-he-do-that miniature worlds of David Hoffos’ Scenes from the House Dream. Viewers have a strong sense of watching, and watching themselves watching at the same time, with each work operating on several different imaginative levels. Or, as Fischer says, “You’re never sure whether you’re inside or outside the illusion.”