Hello Stranger (again) - Recent Screenings featuring Madillah

Hi all,

Hello Stranger, a video featuring my feral creature familiar Madillah, is finally going to be making his on screen Vancouver debut in Moving Arts 2016, a short programme of silent moving images curated as part of  "As the Crow Flies", the 20th Anniversary exhibition of the Eastside Culture Crawl.

Hello Stranger has screened in places as far flung as India, Portugal, Bulgaria, the U.K. and Berlin and I'm excited that after loping globally for the last few years, Madillah will be able to do some local lurking! The exhibition opens tonight, October 21st from 6-9 pm @ the Arts Factory, 281 Industrial Avenue and continues at this location until November 6th. The Moving Arts programme will also be on view November 17-20 @ the Charles Clarke Gallery, 1345 Clark Drive. For more info on times etc. please follow the link http://culturecrawl.ca/events/movingart2016 .

If you're curious about the video, here's a short synopsis:

Hello Stranger features Madillah, a transcultural symbol, an obscurely iconic other, who haunts the interstices of the virtual and actual and the borderlands of urban spaces everywhere. Emanating from somewhere far behind the digital façade and set against the backdrop of an indefinable city, his image appears first on one side of a chain link fence and then on the other, facing away from us and then gesturing towards an unseen viewer. Is he seeking acceptance, bestowing recognition or asking for our help? 

Questions immediately arise about the nature of this character: what is his cultural background or species, where is his actual location? A hybrid refugee, folklore oddity, homeless human or an alien enemy? His guise and gestures are an unknown commodity, reflecting our uncertainties about the veracity or viability of cultural authenticity in the face of an increasingly manufactured ‘global’ citizenship. Is he something to be feared or pitied or, is he perhaps, someone who can be trusted to understand our deeper, stranger motivations?

In an age of dispersal and dissimulation, where geopolitical conflict, climate emergencies and the scrutiny of ever present security camera can script anyone as a potential threat to an increasingly fragile status quo, perhaps Madillah’s greeting is a signal to the outsider that may exist inside us all; a confirmation of our presence, an affirmation of our ‘likeness’.

His image reaching across the confines of the mediated landscape, asks us to do the same: to find a way to identify with the people who exist beyond the borders of our physical space or psychic comfort zones, to reach out and become engaged in the on-going and real time experience of acknowledging difference and finding connection in the world we share with others.

Hello Stranger.

Actually, it'll probably take longer to read the above than to catch the video, which clocks in at only 1 minute. The piece was originally designed to be displayed looped on monitors in the Sophia underground subway system. But oddly enough, it seems to work nicely in a variety of settings. If you're able to have a look, please let me know what you think!

And if you're curious to know more about the origins and/or various manifestations of Madillah, feel free to search for his back story in the pages of this blog, just look for the Madillah tag or label.

Hope the Autumn is being kind to you all x Scot

New work @ the Vancouver Art Book Fair

Hi All, if you're in Vancouver this weekend, October 17th and 18th, please drop by the Vancouver Art Gallery and check out the amazing assortment of book works, zines and more, including the latest book by yours truly called Where is Here, from the series - Documents of Psychic Amateurs published by the fabulous Perro Verlag
http://www.perroverlag.com/dopa.html .

The series explores psychic phenomena in a variety of intriguing ways and includes works from Bucky Fleur, James MacSwain, Sally Rees, Emily Gooden, Courtney Bourke and James Whitman and Owen Plummer. Here's what the publisher has to say about Where Is Here :

"How is a person a medium, how a conduit, a visionary, a faker? What happens when a ghost enters the room? And who are the ghosts anyway? My Name Is Scot's document, Where is Here, won't provide answers to any of these questions directly but it is, nevertheless, a profoundly focused engagement with, and evocation of the images and voices hovering at the edges of these questions." 

I might add that the book discretely touches on notions of people gone missing and the structures and systems that contrive to disappear them. I might also add that some of the source materials for the book were adapted from the Journals of the Society for Psychical Research, a multi volume anthology which used to reside far back in the stacks @ the VPL but which has since 'vanished' during one of the many recent Library makeovers and which, according to current system records, never existed at all...

Please drop by and say hello to the Perro Verlag crew who will be sharing a table with the Western Front on the first floor. For more info on time and location please visit :  http://2015.vancouverartbookfair.com 

And if you get a chance to look @ Where is Here, I'd love to hear what you think! 

Material Witness- final images from Walking in Sofia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memento Mori- New Images from Walking in Sofia