Recent Developments: some new images and some long-term issues that just won't go away.

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Temporary Assignment - New work @ the Richmond Art Gallery

I've just finished installing a new piece called Ingress/Egress @ the Richmond Art Gallery. The exhibition is called Temporary Assignment and it's up from November 19th - 30th, only a short run, but there will be a closing reception on Friday, November 30th from 7-9 PM and you're invited! After 20 years the gallery is re-surfacing their walls, so they've invited 10 artists to create work that goes right onto or in my case, right into the gallery wall. There's some really interesting work in the show, so I hope you get a chance to drop by. Here's the gallery's website for details about getting there: http://www.richmondartgallery.org/ 

And here's some background on my piece from the official statement:

Ingress/Egress explores notions of affect and agency and the roles that language, technology and architecture play in determining identity and defining the limitations or expectations of body and self.

 

 The two text block tableaus incorporate fragments of found language, including case study data, pop song lyrics, confessional diary entries and social media ‘status’ updates. 

 Each tableau can be read as an entry point or an exit, a virtual portal to explore or escape the public dialogues, private monologues and ambient textual noises that envelop our bodies and inform or intrude upon our innermost self.

Ingress/Egress by one definition suggests: “The power or liberty of access” in relation to “the act or right of going out”.

By carving and rendering text directly into the wall of the gallery, Ingress/Egress hopes to lead the viewer into a consideration of the spatial, textual and virtual constructions that support our public meanings and institutions  and perhaps, suggest a way to carve out our own version of self from the wall of information that increasingly defines our media saturated lives. 

                                

So much for strategy, in reality, 20 years of repeated painting made the gallery walls incredibly hard and very resistant to being intruded upon.  

Knuckles bloodied and arm muscles cramping, I persevered and adapted and some unanticipated surface applications developed alongside the more successful incursions below the surface and while my tactics for tackling the wall were severely challenged, in the end, my intentions were perhaps even better served and I'm pretty happy with how the piece turned out.

Hope you can make it to the Gallery for a look at the finished results. 

Shoot Me! - A Synopsis

The last few posts are texts from a project called Shoot Me! They’re based on extracts from filming notices I’ve been collecting over the last few years, from productions shot in my neighborhood, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. I think of them as “picture in picture” narratives, but they can be read as screenplays for unseen performances or closed captioned storyboards or maybe even stage directions, for walking the increasingly fine line that separates the real from the unreal on the streets of the DTES.

I’ve lifted location details and scene descriptions directly from the notices, cut and pasted fragments of dialogue and film lingo from the shooting scripts, call sheets and screenplays that I’ve found discarded on the streets and then re-mixed the whole thing to try and reveal the sometimes uncanny, occasionally inconsiderate and often uncomfortable narrative overlaps between life as lived in one of Canada’s poorest postal codes and life as filtered through the lens of Hollywood North.

The DTES has always been a kind of ground zero for Hollywood North productions, being malleable enough to be dressed up for mid-town Manhattan, stripped down for small town, depression era Mid-west, or more often than not, filmed almost as is, to mimic the urban ghetto of Anytown, USA . Alleys get cleaned up, hosed down and then re-filled with “prop” garbage, neighbourhood residents get hustled out of the way and replaced with extras dressed to look like the very people they’ve displaced. TV shows are filmed about serial killers while local women are disappearing on the same streets that “fake” police cars are cruising. As a long time resident of the area, at some point, you can no longer tell if the “Crime Scene” tape is real or a prop. Like it or not you find yourself cast as an extra and scripted into storylines and scenarios that are not always of your own choosing.

The film production notices themselves are usually a bland mixture of damage control and boosterism; filled with thumbnail sketches of the action, mundane parking restriction info, apologies for noise, pleas for late night filming extensions, tantalizing hints about the “Stars” involved and thanks in advance for “your support of B.C.’s film industry”. Reading between the lines, there’s a wealth of other information about money, agency, gentrification and identity.

In the texts I’ve composed, I’ve maintained and/or recreated the original formatting of the source document text – i.e. aspects of spacing/layout, Italics to signify either the title of the film being produced or to note quoted dialogue and the use of Caps or Bold type to denote specific times/ location info. Fracture, Revolution and The Butterfly effect 1&2 are built entirely out of text excerpted from production notices, call sheets, and screenplays. The other piece, Re-Write, is a screenplay-esque treatment of two actual incidents that occurred in conjunction with filming in the DTES ( the placement of a cryptic billboard for a Canadian TV series new season, in the middle of “The Stroll” and another production company's hanging of a prop female corpse, right behind the Women’s Drop-in Shelter, both events occuring during the height of the search for the neighbourhood’s missing women).

The images in between the texts include scans of discarded film ephemera, as well as pictures I’ve taken, documenting actual film shoots in the neighbourhood. There are also a few images from an earlier project of mine called Hollywood, Not, where I hand painted a number of fictitious film signs and hung them in anticipation of upcoming film shoots.

Collectively, the texts function as a sort of mise en scène of the area’s supposed meta-narrative. Individual pieces can be read as Cinéma Vérité call sheets, cutaway shots of the cutting room floor, or perhaps, a montage of real-time rushes or dailies, from the filmed on location pilot, based on a true story, about life in a make believe place called – 'The Downtown Eastside'.

Or maybe Shoot Me! is just my attempt to script myself into the mix, so I can figure out which side of the camera I’m really on.

Re-Write

Re-Write

ACT 01

INT. LIVING ROOM – 03’S APARTMENT – CONTINUOUS – NIGHT

WE PULL BACK FURTHER

CLOSE ON CONDOM

CLOSE ON KLEENEX

CLOSE ON NEEDLE

CLOSE ON STYROFOME SOUP BOWL

03

( continuing)

Come on let’s get outta here.

02

(continuing)

Where? I got nowhere else to go.

Cut to:

03 smirks.

01 thinks a second.

02 laughs –( to herself)

03 cuts her off…

She pauses. She buzzes. She waits.

A beat of awkward silence.

FADE UP ON A BRIGHT RED SUN

ACT 02

INT. LOCKED ROOM SHED – NIGHT

He’s wearing street clothes. A tight tee shirt, ragged acid wash jeans, a bulky, oversize wool jacket, scuffed black runners, no socks and a faded Planet Hollywood baseball cap.

02 enters an INDUSTRIAL SECTION of town. She sees the OCEAN in the distance. – and the GIANT CRANES that unload ships.

03 roars around a corner – fishtails – sideswipes a parked van and keeps going.

A Police Car pulls out of an alley and tries to block the road.

CLOSE ON – TELEVISION NEWS ANNOUNCER

REVEAL…

DESERTED INDUSTRIAL AREA (AKA –THE STROLL)

PAN TO…

BILLBOARD – grim faced City Coroner looks down at shrouded body lying on ground, tag line reads: 13 Fresh Ones.

WE PUSH IN CLOSE – ON DUMPSTER

A POLICE CRUISER pulls into the vacant lot – slowly glides around the perimeter – stops beside what looks like a pile of garbage.

COP – calls in to dispatch

We’ve got a problem

ACT 03

INT. CARGO VAN

03 looks backwards INTO THE REAR VIEW MIRROR

– only to see …

OVERHEAD VIEW – of run down street filled with cheap hotels

SECURITY GUARD

THE SECURITY GUARD’s P.O.V. of – caged off area behind boarded up building.

EXTREME CLOSE UP of an old TELEVISION with a smashed in screen.

MEDIUM CLOSE ON – FEET RUNNING – FAST.

REVEAL…

The light changes, car horns blow raucously as the girl runs out into traffic flow, dodging cars, just missing being hit by a bus and then slipping away down a dark alley.

A new angle REVEALS :

EXT. ALLEY – DAY – RAIN

CLOSE ON :

A young woman, looking old and chewed up in ratty clothes,

TITLES: ANGELA DAWN. DISAPPEARED NOVEMBER 11, 1988.

ACT 04

EXT. CITY STREET – DAY

Candace : How did she get there?

Candace’s POV of Angela ducking into dingy doorway.

CHARACTER 01

Dialogue…….

CHARACTER 01 ( CONT’D)

Dialogue…

(and then)

Dialogue…

CHARACTER 02

Dialogue……

(a moment and then)

Dialogue

EXT. CITY – SKY VIEW

Cut to:

SEDAN cruising city streets - NIGHT

ACT 5

FADE UP ON ALLEY – DUMPSTERS – PUDDLES FILLED WITH TRASH

NEW ANGLE REVEALS: Caged back porch of building backing on to alley.

Door opens, tired looking, middle aged woman steps out to light a cigarette, stops, looks down and fiddles with lighter, looks up and gasps.

EXTREME CLOSEUP of her face as she shouts the word – HELP!

WOMAN’S POV: Looking through WIRE CAGE to TALL, OLD TREE on edge of vacant lot behind building. Hanging from a branch in the tree is what appears to be a woman’s corpse.

PULL BACK as woman runs back inside building, doors slams shut. Signage on door reads: WOMEN’S SHELTER.

CUT TO: OVERHEAD VIEW Set Dressers on LADDER awkwardly removing prop of strangled corpse down out of tree. PULL BACK to reveal FILM TRUCKS, CAMERA further along alley. CREW milling around, Director throwing up hands, Principles shaking heads.

FADE IN : Busy Film Production Office, Location Manager - on phone looking rueful, Assistant - filing, listening to conversation and shrugging, Secretary - typing, rolls eyes…

EXTREME CLOSEUP of page coming out of printer –TEXT READS: … We realize your neighbourhood entertains it's fair share of filming and we are sensitive to concerns about filming in the area…

FADE OUT

ROLL CREDITS

The Wild Goose

The Wild Goose is up and running as part of CologneOFF V, an on-line film festival initiated in Cologne. Please visit the festival and have a look, there's a lot of excellent work. My piece was completed earlier this year and it seems to be striking a cord out there; It was also included in the Videoholica International Video Art Festival in Varna, Bulgaria this August.

Here's the full length synopsis:

The Wild Goose is from a series of works called Hunt & Gather, which examine the real and imagined behaviours of human and animal populations as they both struggle to survive in an increasingly challenging and competitive global environment. Diminishing resources, disappearing eco systems, and the pandemic spread of disease between species is further straining the already fragile relationship between creatures sharing the planet. Despite the recent wave of “Eco –Awareness”, the covert battle for the last remaining scraps of habitat, food, and water is becoming increasingly violent and desperate. As our fate becomes more obviously entwined with the fate of other species, can we be sure that ‘we’ will be the ultimate survivors? The Wild Goose posits a reversal of the hierarchy which has placed humans at the top of the food chain. Humans will now reap what they have sown; peaceful co-existence can no longer be taken for granted. Sides must be taken, the lines have been drawn, and like it or not, the hunter has now become the hunted.

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