ON VIMEO NOW (opens in new window)
Tuesday 30 March 2021
Tuesday 2 March 2021
Friday 20 November 2020
PAINTING-MOSAIC VIDEOS
https://vimeo.com/448628327
A video about Munich Project made for Cape Breton ConnectArts, summer 2020 (opens in new window)
Back in Canada, but the Munich Project continues.
THANK YOU:
Dr. Christiane Menzfeld
Brigitte Schwörer
Lisa Breyer
Dr. Sabine Suppmann
Ieulian Iermak
Mahesh Lingaraju
Songwei He
Albrecht Herrmann
Thomas Linsmayer
Martin Rohmer
Carmen Nöhbauer
Ingeborg Ott
Päivi Naskali-Schrank
Uli Schaarschmidt
Mary Ann Wilson
Heather MacIsaac
Else Gebauer
THANK YOU:
Dr. Christiane Menzfeld
Brigitte Schwörer
Lisa Breyer
Dr. Sabine Suppmann
Ieulian Iermak
Mahesh Lingaraju
Songwei He
Albrecht Herrmann
Thomas Linsmayer
Martin Rohmer
Carmen Nöhbauer
Ingeborg Ott
Päivi Naskali-Schrank
Uli Schaarschmidt
Mary Ann Wilson
Heather MacIsaac
Else Gebauer
Sample demos for an adaptable method of turning paintings into a kinetic environment made of light and speed. I've taken photos of full uncropped paintings of my own, with no digital manipulation except for rotating and reversing, and constructed a dynamic mosaic of images in rhythmic compositions of one-tenth of a second each. The pulse is not imposed but discovered during the making. The piece suggests a system of extending the reach of painting practice in a new way. It offers an experience modified by its medium: it looks different on phone, laptop, desktop, or large monitor. It can be projected, indoors or outdoors, onto a screen or wall at traditional painting size. As a three-channel installation on existing gallery architecture it functions as a complete environment. It works in the film and video festival sphere. It can go anywhere and both augment and be reshaped by its venue. The piece can be short or long, but in its ideal gallery form will run for two to four hours, roughly an evening's experience. This is not for length but for scale. The images don't play in what is referred to in music as 'horizontal time'-- they don't go from one place to another, like a melody. Instead they function in 'vertical time', suspended in a perpetual present. like a hanging mobile sculpture. The patterns don't repeat, so what you see is a dependable ongoing metamorphosis, stimulating and/or calming. Because one can't establish the informational meaning of any single image, one shifts to a second-order experience of viewing where the patterning flow itself develops narratives, narratives of the kind we find in instrumental music. The demo samples you'll see on the Vimeo links make the process clear.
(STROBE WARNING: The three videos rely on strobe effects. People with photosensitivity or seizure disorders are urged to exercise caution.)
Demo: painting-mosaic Viral Load
Demos: painting-mosaic
Tuesday 18 August 2020
RUN VITRUVIAN 3
7.2020 oil on canvas 190.5 cm X 152.5 cm
A video describing my 2020 Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry Artist Residency and exhibition, Munich, February to April, and how the pandemic landed in the very place where it was being studied.
Made in August 2020 for the Cape Breton Regional Municipality ConnectArts Program.
https://vimeo.com/448628327
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Tools of the biochemists
Levitating in the Alte Pinakothek
OTHER VIDEOS:
HAIR PLANE is a nine-minute video shot during Air Canada flight 844 from Munich to Toronto on 23 March 2020, one of the last before the grounding of airplanes due to the COVID-19 pandemic.A more detailed description follows further below on this blog page.
https://vimeo.com/400407688
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Munich airport is empty. 23 March 2020
10 BULLS
A jet-hopping cowboy sings a twelfth-century poem about the stations of enlightenment.
https://vimeo.com/228475104
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QUARANTINE PICTURES
MARCH - AUGUST 2020
A Kleenex box designed for the 2019 flu season, with a carefree mid-20th-century graphic of jazz microbes, becomes indexical in late March 2020 as a shelter for a self-isolating film noir woman in trouble.
2020 50.8 X 40.6 panel
Kleenex box, Belgian film poster
Every visual artist in the world is by now engaged in figuring out how to portray a new milieu of masked faces. Or rather, how they can say something that is not self-evident, not overly on-the-nose, perhaps even resistant to becoming dated too soon. The masked face is to today as the postures of a figure seen from a distance addressing their cell phone is to just yesterday.
An airplane motion sickness bag takes on a glow of nostalgia in light of the increasingly empty skies. The 3-D glasses complete the portrait by their association with escape bought at the cost of vertigo.
2020 50.8 X 40.6 panel
3-D glasses, air sickness bag
There is, of course, a video game based on Homer's 'Odyssey'. And the Magavox Odyssey was the first commercial home video game console, released in 1972. Millions of young people are relying more than ever this summer on escape entertainment, distractions, and reliefs. Ice cream and comic books are evergreen comforts.
This piece hooks up with picture no. 6 below, in its chain of associations. According to Julian Jaynes, in 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind', the temporal distance between Homer's 'Illiad' (treating 'Homer' as a label for a bardic tradition rather than as a single author) and Homer's 'Odyssey' is an index of the emergence of consciousness, or private inner life-- the human ability to introspect. Jaynes posits that before the 2nd millennium BCE, the hemispheres of the brain communicated as if they were separate entities.
The warriors of 'The Illiad' are guided by voices, which they reasonably interpret as coming from the gods. They act within a fatalistic world of myth. Odysseus, in 'The Odyssey', is the first modern man; his brain has achieved an early form of functional lateralization. Possessing the solitude of a unified inner life, he is now capable of trickery and deceit.
Whether Jaynes' theory is genius or fallacy, it yields an excellent metaphor. To be isolated, to be fundamentally alone as oneself --especially in the company of others who are in the same fix-- is a new existential quandary. It demands either a sharpening of whatever it is we mean when we speak of 'mindfulness', or else we face a sinking back into the mindset of bicamerality-- into the comforts of escape, surrender, and compliance with the voices from tireless, opaque places in the culture which would shape our ethos to ends beyond our acknowledgement.
2020 50.8 X 40.6 panel
Vintage Classics Illustrated No. 81 cover, 1951
Wooden ice cream bar stick
The letters spelling 'hope', scattered like dice, quickly suggest 'home' as well. But just as quickly the name Poe emerges like an unnerving guest. When we think of Poe it's likely that our first thought will be of 'The Raven', which here appears as spread wings creating a roof shape, with a thunderbolt descending. The Goth-Romantic endpaper illustrations of wrathful waves stress the idea of the sea as land's end: you're going no further. The apocalyptic oracle bird is now inside the house. The letters reflect your own face.
The likely second impression in the chain of associations with Poe will be 'The Masque of the Red Death', which, along with Bocaccio's 'Decameron' and Camus' 'The Plague' has become a lockdown bestseller.
2020 50.8 X 40.6 panel
Hardcover pastedown endpapers from German edition of Virginia Woolf: 'To The Lighthouse' ('Zum Leuctturm') 1952;
Plastic mirrored letters
Being a Finn, my favourite 20th century Finnish pop singer is Tapio Rautavaara, the "Finnish Johnny Cash". One of his signature songs was 'Tuopin Jäljet', which translates as "the marks, or stains, that my drinking mug leaves on the table". The singer ruefully recollects his life of mostly distraction and dissipation, but accepts that it's his own albatross: "I recognize my own tankard rings".
The mug stains here have become a roiling sea of isolation drinking --temps perdu-- with a Captain Ahab questing for his lost 52nd card, like the singer in the Statler Brothers' 'Flowers on the Wall': "playing solitaire till dawn with a deck of fifty-one".
The ace of spades contains a pair of wrestlers struggling over a Mercator map of the world. The card states "designed and made in British Hong Kong". The once and lately small, flat, global world has now reasserted the severity of distance and the resistant topography of politics.
2020 50.8 X 40.6 panel
Rockwell Kent: Captain Ahab illustration photocopy;
Novelty oversize playing card, British Hong Kong, c. 1960;
Coffee, tea, ink, watercolour
The meditating Buddha / Ganesha figure sits under a cloud of dubious theory, which nevertheless offers a toehold of hope for the ascendancy of heedfulness over shambles.
2020 50.8 X 40.6 panel
Mango packaging, Colibri Fruit Co., Mexico
Dust jacket, Houghton Mifflin Co.,1976
Post-surgery eyeglass insert
Lenticular 3-D plastic eye
Wednesday 13 May 2020
studio 8 June 2020
Back in Canada, but the Munich Project continues.
THANK YOU:
Dr. Christiane Menzfeld
Brigitte Schwörer
Lisa Breyer
Dr. Sabine Suppmann
Ieulian Iermak
Mahesh Lingaraju
Songwei He
Albrecht Herrmann
Thomas Linsmayer
Martin Rohmer
Carmen Nöhbauer
Ingeborg Ott
Päivi Naskali-Schrank
Uli Schaarschmidt
Mary Ann Wilson
Heather MacIsaac
Else Gebauer
This series is called Run Vitruvian. It is a sequential adaptation of Leonardo's famous Vitruvian Man, which represented the body as the measure of nature through math and architecture, seen through the lens of Renaissance perspective. My running figure places the body in a world defined by the constantly evolving frame of reference set by the New Physics and New Genetics, a world where physical and biological boundaries that were once fixed are now mutable and malleable. Our current world circumstances keep bearing this out.
What they study at Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry is not strictly visible. The nature of proteins, molecules, cells, viruses, are
not seen but deciphered from instrument data. My running figure functions as a reference framework
that is able to picture any varied relation of the body to its surroundings and circumstances.
Examples:
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The balance between foreign but symbiotic resident microbes and our own cells.
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The aerodynamics around our bodies that allow us to repel airborne viruses.
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The non-stop replenishment of our cells, and how the body constantly reconstructs itself.
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The body as a system of proteins fuelled by chemical fires, operating in a world that is
fundamentally a swarm of electrons.
RUN VITRUVIAN 1
4.2020 oil on canvas 183 cm X 152.5 cm
RUN VITRUVIAN 2
4.2020 oil on canvas 183 cm X 152.5 cm
HAIR PLANE is a nine-minute video shot during Air Canada flight 844 from Munich to Toronto on 23 March 2020, one of the last before the grounding of airplanes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The footage was edited and uploaded to Vimeo the next day.
We had just ended an artist residency and exhibition at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry (BIOC) in Munich, and were preparing for another at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics when the world turned a corner and we had no choice but to leave Germany before a possible shutdown of travel, and visa restrictions.
We were very close to the centre of events because BIOC is a world centre of studies in molecules, bacteria, proteins, and viruses. The scientists are at the front lines of studying the nearly invisible world that makes up the very substance of our lives. So the work I made over the months that the pandemic was coming into view was directly related to the ongoing information I was receiving from experts.
The content of HAIR PLANE is an extension of the ideas behind the work I did at BIOC.
I shot several hour's worth of footage over the nine hour trip, which I boiled down to nine minutes. My challenge was the technical-aesthetic demand at the centre of minimalist art: how do you take a very small amount of visual material and shape it into a form that expands its meanings into something universal. How do you tweak a time-based flow of images so that a viewer is moved to forget about their expectations and to interpret the information they're seeing as a new form of narrative whose implications transcend their simplicity.
As usual, my friend bernard siller penetrated the whole thing right away. I would wish for every artist to get such a discerning review of their work. He wrote:
"a concentrated comment on ‘hairline hygiene‘ … fits all ways since cabin window can be an indexical for shape of the human skull … you exhibit eminent patience and control in the shooting … which i take to be evidence of the meditative powers infused by that ‘just about to have your ass saved‘ feeling ! … unfortunately all those poor refugee microbes inhabiting that dead hair may not have made it off the plane as efficiently as you did … and just imagine that one of them may have been a cure for cancer ! … i’d surely enter it under ‘ short epic '.
HAIR PLANE A film from the end of the old world
Here's the link to Vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/400407688
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