Hungover for Three Days Straight marries my visual art and music practices. This performative video is set in a bleak, wintery Saskatchewan landscape. The ambiguous performance touches on notes of isolation, labour, weariness and perseverance. Continue Reading →
Sears Portraits
I am interested in memory and the popular western cultural modes of remembering and memorializing. I am intrigued by photographic practices that have developed to this end, particularly the ongoing developments in portrait photography. This experiment involved me posing at Sears Portrait Studios while utterly intoxicated.
Big girls need lots of tender lovin’ care
Big girls need lots of tender lovin care is a rear projection piece with a de-synchronized audio component.
Losing Elsie June
Long curtains push their way to the ceiling. They hide, they reveal. Inside, at the end of the corridor, a strange bed piece, a rhythmic crawling video. The invented bed contraption, part display case, part magic show prop, suggests the compromise of its human subject while promising a perfect, unobstructed view of the events as they unfold. The video captured from the device is beautiful — the folds of fabric, the luminous skin inviting to the touch. Its reflection on the glass surface reiterates the transparent but physical barrier which separated subject from viewer. A sense of passage and longing pervades the piece.
We always knew she’d be the first to go
We always knew she’d be the first to go challenges our wistful idealism regarding old age and dying. The ceiling is just a little too low and the hall, just a little to narrow to be comfortable. At the end of the corridor is a monitor. A romantic vision of an elderly person slipping gracefully into death is shifted by awkward conversation between a grandmother and grandson. Frustrating dialogue and laboured goodbyes are interspersed with images of an old woman oblivious to the camera. Drifting off she is peaceful, beautiful; she awakes to crudely probe her mouth with a finger, her gestures disquieting. She defies our expectations as suggested by the title, furthering our understanding of the complicated relationships between aging and death, grief and acceptance.
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A studio visit and drinks with Ian Carr-Harris through Mercer Union’s In Studio series.
