I am a video, photography and text-based artist.
I am primarily interested in visual impacts of economic activity on the landscape and on society. My subject matter focuses on infrastructures such as ports, distribution centres and highway systems. My art research revolves around the importance of time in narrative constructions and on finding images in text and narrative in images . I work in video, photography and text. I attempt to present possible connections and disparities across media so that the engaged viewer will be led toward considering the subject matter from an ethical or political perspective.
My exhibition at Axenéo7 (October, 2010), explored the vastness and complexity of modern sea ports through the use of the cinematic tracking shot and explored the impact of ports on workers and those who live near them through interviews and texts.
My show at the Galerie de l’UQAM, entitled Hatred of Capitalism, explores notions of landscapes and factories and possible effects on an intimate space. The show includes The 400 Doors (2007), a travelling shot of a Walmart’s Eastern Canadian distribution centre, a video, Crows 1 (2007), of crows on the side of a four-lane highway and a number of images of “tears” in the environment (prints of forestry routes, power lines and mine tailings taken from Google satellite imagery). The show also includes a fragment of a country road, made of asphalt, screening, and 3/4 gravel, that is only one foot long (but is the correct width, which is 21 feet).
I began my art practice in the mid 1990s as a spoken word performer as part of a Montreal-based group of 5, called the Fluffy Pagan Echoes. We performed a lot – in cabarets, in cafes, in art galleries. We worked with the sounds of words and gestures to create moments of meaning for the audience, usually around political ideas, interpersonal relationships or just to be funny.
Over the past ten years, I have made videos that often explore these same themes. In 2001, I became interested in incorporating my experience at work and in the world into my videos. Videos such as Body of Water (2005), and l’Homme qui tombe (The Man who Fell, 2006), look at the outside world – its injustices, its gaze) – on very personal spaces such as intimate relationships and the filmed body.
A landscape – my landscape – is a question. A crow, on an electrical wire, alongside a country road: is it looking at us or are we looking at it? Does my picture of a crow tell you why it’s there? Does it tell you anything at all about this bird? It may tell you why I was there.
But who am I? What am I doing in this landscape? What is this landscape doing in me?And what about the country road? Is it a stage on which people just keep passing each other? Or is it simply a new kind of factory, the only real factory left here?
I live with my family near Wakefield, QC, on a little country road.