Passages - Dance for the Camera project, 2006-2007

I undertook this project for Hugh Macpherson as a private commission. It has taken over one year to complete but has been well worth it. Hugh is an improv dancer and through this video we encounter him through 3 different passages all created in a 3d environment using my photography from a trip to France in 2005. The video combines my love of motion graphics with live motion and of course dance. Hugh and I first met at Lynda Raino's dance studio in a modern class with Connie Cooke.

Passage I - Released
CBC Exposure Link: http://www.cbc.ca/exposure/node/4578
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Passage II - Family
CBC Exposure Link: http://www.cbc.ca/exposure/node/5970
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Passage III - Arrival
CBC Exposure Link: http://www.cbc.ca/exposure/node/4563
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The LabourArt Project movie, 1997-2000

The LabourArt Project was a collaborative project I undertook with photographic artist James Masters from Owen Sound, Ontario. In this project we documented 24 hours in Grey and Bruce Counties through photography and audio sound scapes. The resulting work was mounted as a travelling exhibition with a multimedia station where viewers could also peruse the web site and listen to the audio sound scapes. A major objective of the LabourArt Project was to position artists and other workers as part of the working community that mightn't ever come into contact except through the gallery installation. You can read the whole artist statement about this project in the Writing Section and also see the website in the design section. This particular video won Best Interactive Video and New Media Project at the Sooke Film Festival in 2000.

Gypo Logging Board Game, Molly Hogan Character

Surveillance I, Motion graphics video; short story book “A day at the Pompidou” Location: Centre Pompidou 2005-2007

Surveillance evolved from a trip to France in the summer of 2005. I was quite conscious of being a tourist and artist at the same time unlike previous trips to Europe. This video takes place inside and outside the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris.

DESCRIPTION:
This is the story of what can happen on any given day while sight seeing in Paris and taking in some of the most important galleries in the world. On this particular day we were visiting the Centre Pompidou, home to a vast collection of modern and contemporary art works but there were things going on outside the gallery that were also getting my attention….

The video is a motion graphics piece documenting the square outside the Pompidou centre during a whole day of visiting. The perspective starts from outside the gallery and entertainments that are taking place and moves to the inside the gallery looking out to the square as we travelled up the escalators to each level. My subject starts with a man laying in the square. He has a wine bottle behind him and appears to be passed out. People and pigeons pass by seeming to not notice him at all. As I traverse each level of the gallery I see that the man has left, yet the bottle remains. Passers-by treat the bottle in a similarly unmindful manner. When the bottle disappears at the top floor, the artist finds herself in an unexplainable, irrational and absurd predicament. In an attempt to bring a different conclusion to the story the artist and friends re-stage the scene in the square and get some surprising results.

Excerpts from the short storybook: People continued to wander past him; they seemed unconcerned, unfazed by the person laying there but they clearly had a path that went right past him; was he laying in the midst of an ancient animal crossroads or track that hearkened back to prehistoric hunting routes? Perhaps these people were just following ancient instincts that lead them past this sleeping creature; or this was just Paris and tourists in their travel weary somnambulance could just walk by, nonchalant at having seen it all in the city of light….

It was getting late, almost 8 o’clock; coming out of the top floor gallery was like getting off a train in a new city - familiar but with a sense of having been irrevocably changed by what you just left, and so you look on the next scene with different eyes. I sat waiting for the rest of our group to come out and my eyes instinctively wandered through the glass to the approximate location on the ground outside where I had last seen the bottle. But where was the bottle? Ah! it was gone! It never really occurred to me as being important until it was gone. I felt the absurdity of the emotion almost as I felt it, but just the same the thought was there - where did it go? That bottle that I had secretly tracked and spied on all afternoon; that bottle that reminded me so much of the abandoned table lamp in the IKEA commercial. Had I been reduced to trying to live out a commercial? Maybe I had finally succumbed to what the kids were calling the effects of ‘art torture’ where one’s mind is so numbed by the seemingly infinite collections of art, that it feebly grasps at anything that will secure an anchor to reality. But if this scene was my anchor, I was in deep trouble….

The storybook will take the form of a handmade journal to traditional illuminated manuscripts using high quality digital images and handwritten text. The book will be located on a reading table in the middle of the gallery. The table will have a reading lamp, box of latex gloves, magnifying glass, a text pointer and a box of kleenex.

Gypo Logging Board Game, Wendle's Welding Character

Botanical Beach, Black and White, 8x10m 2000-2001