Each night a short audio composition (including the telephone service, Cocteau’s Orpheé radio announcements, the sound of a clear running stream, Gluck’s Orpheus and Euridice, a solo improvisational saxophone, birds flying and attacking, and isolated voice-overs) was heard outside the entrance to the bookstore. Inside a single dream image flooded the back wall. This was repeated every night for six weeks, with a different image every night.
During the day a stack of altered books near the cash register, copies of Georges Polti’s The 36 Dramatic Situations, with tiny images and audio text slipped between the bound pages, were the only residue of the previous night’s "work".
[This work later evolved into An Archive for The Lost Ones ]
Supplication • Deliverance • Crime Pursued By Vengence • Vengeance Taken for Kindred Upon Kindred • Pursuit • Disaster • Falling Prey to Cruelty or Misfortune • Revolt • Daring Enterprise • Abduction • The Enigma • Obtaining • Enmity of Kinsmen • Rivalry of Kinsmen • Murderous Adultery • Madness • Fatal Impudence • Involuntary Crimes of Love • Slaying of Kinsmen Unrecognized • Self Sacrificing for an Ideal • Self Sacrifice for Kindred • All Sacrificed for a Passion • Neccesity of Sacrificing Loved Ones • Rivalry of Superior and Inferior • Adultery • Crimes of Love • Discovery of the Dishonor of a Loved One • Obstacles to Love • An Enemy Loved • Ambition • Conflict With a God • Mistaken Jealousy • Erroneous Judgement • Remorse • Recovery of a Lost One • Loss of Loved Ones
96 Containers was an exhibition of 96 artists from port cities around the world. The works were each installed in individual shipping containers arranged on an industrial wharf according to geographical location.
The I Love You Forever video is projected floor to ceiling and wall to wall inside the back the shipping container. The camera is positioned over a car dashboard and stayed focused on a large house, isolated in the middle of the prairie. It's the beginning of winter, drifts of snow swirl across the road at the bottom of the frame. As the car moves forward the lens pulls back; as the car shifts in reverse the lens pulls forward. The house stays motionless in the frame while everything in the foreground moves unsteadily - something is not quite right.
The visitor enters the container and faces a large pale video projection showing a vast prairie and a gabled house at the edge of town. The image has been overexposed and recorded on an overcast day. A zoom lens keeps the image in exactly the same position relative to the frame as the camera slowly moves away. The camera proceeds forward, the lens pulls back, and the image remains in a restless but relatively stable position. Done flawlessly, the sensation would be one of remaining still. But slight inaccuracies, an unsteady hand, in the camera work create a sense that something is not quite right. This rhythm of attraction and resistance continues throughout the piece.
Thousands of fortune cookies scattered below the "horizon" of the image, cover the floor, releasing a cloying sweet smell as they are crushed underfoot.
EXHIBITION HISTORY
96 Containers, Art Across Oceans, Copenhagen Denmark.North American curators Louise Dompierre and Patrick Murphy (catalog)
Nausea, University of Lethbridge,Alberta Canada, curated by Jeffrey Spalding
The narration details expectations, disappointments, suspicions, and longing, tracing the tidal pulls of the heart.
"...I imagine coming home earlier than expected and perhaps..."
edition of glass fortune cookies with "I know that you lie to me" written inside
Commissioned public art piece installed at a multi-use residential tower in Vancouver, Canada.
10,000 Faucets and Doorknobswas installed as multiple elements, linked visually across the public entrance to the site. Fragments and details of residential architecture are sealed in an amber coloured resin an embedded in the surface of the sidewalk. Although they carry an illusion of significant depth, as if there existed an alternate mass beneath the face of the building, the pieces are never more than 2” thick.
10,000 Faucets and Doorknobs was developed and installed in the same neighborhood as an earlier work Fugue.
Composed as a series of fissures the piece functions on several scales: as a pathway accompanying the public through the site; on closer inspection as individual “cells” filled with narrative details; and from a distance as an underlying structure, a cadence of a collective memory beneath its current form. At times its presence seems primary; at other times the piece seems to disappear. This layered presence allows multiple readings, both by various visitors to the site and, over time, by people who pass by everyday.
TideCatcher detail, patinaed copper, copper wire, wood, rope and nails
after 40 days wrapped to mussel- encrusted piles under Jericho Wharf
Eighty constructions, made of entirely new materials, were attached to muslin sheetings, wrapped around the pilings under the Jericho wharf and left to the effects of the high and low tides. After 40 days the TideCatchers were removed and installed on a wall at the Main Exit Gallery in a two- dimensional configuration of the original installation.
detail, TideCatchers in-situ at low tide.
detail of announcement with tide cart showing low-tide access under the Jericho Wharf