Video

a little bit of nothing

a little bit of nothing is a collection of eight videos that grew out of a small but significant translation I stumbled across in Buster Keaton's autobiography. "A little bit of nothing," comes from the Spanish term pamplinas. It is a word that does not easily translate into English. Keaton and a friend were attending the bullfights one afternoon, when the crowd realizing the silent film star was in their presence swarmed and began yelling at him. Keaton believed they were ridiculing him, taunting his American presence. Sensing Keaton was worried, his friend, a native of Spain, set the actor at ease. He told him not to worry, that they were in fact praising him and that their cheers were honorary. Inquiring as to what they were saying, Keaton's friend replied they were calling him "a little bit of nothing", which in Spanish is equivalent to the "hole in a doughnut" or a "blank sheet of paper".
This video work grew out of that small but significant translation.

As an artist working with video my interests lie primarily in the co-constructive role of the viewer rather in my own contribution as the facilitator or creator of the work. In these video vignettes I am experimenting with the positioning of the viewer within a narrative and the deconstructive or transient nature of the metaphor in the production of meaning. I am interested in how the viewer may be manipulated to assume the different roles of not only the spectator, but also as an active participant, a participant who must come to terms with the often difficult, yet occasionally humorous and futile scenarios which are presented.
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down the drain

No matter how hungry you are, you should never eat Chinese takeout that has been sitting in the fridge for a week. I can't stress this point enough. Maybe if I'd taken the time to pick up some groceries this never would have happened. But it was busy week at work. We had two deadlines to meet by Thursday and we if didn't, Carl, told us we would be spending the weekend with the want ads. The only time I left the office was catch to a few hours of sleep and feed Ricky the goldfish.
As it turns out we never did make the deadline and when push came to shove they sent me walking. They said I couldn't take the pressure. They said I wasn't a team player. They said this was no way to treat a company who had done so much for me.

It was Wednesday morning and I had forgotten to pick up bread the night before. There was nothing to eat besides some instant soup, a jar of pickles and some leftover takeout. I opted for the takeout. I knew it was old but it smelled fine and I figured since there was no meat in it, it couldn't go bad. I made it as far as the Expressway before realizing that something inside me had gone horribly wrong.

I spent the next six days on the toilet.
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fullcontactpiano collaborative works with shawn bristow

The deal was this:

We had sort of known each other since high school. We never really hung out but we had a lot of same friends and it turns out we have near identical record collections.

The first time I was living in Vancouver we hooked up at this weird rocker party. They were playing an AM station on the tape deck and drinking beer from coolers even though there was a fridge in the kitchen. There was an upright piano pushed against the back wall. fullcontactpiano (originally conceievd as a performance) was the natural outcome of this party. It was a fairly straightforward “piece”. It required a piano, an eighteen pack of Pilsner, and a high threshold for pain. There was only one rule: No punching in the face.

I left Vancouver for a few years to go to school. When I moved back I ran into Shawn at one of his performances. Can’t really remember where it was, just that David Yonge was there and he wrestled a fridge.

Anyway, we started to talk about collaborating on some video work and how we could approach making something. Since we were both busy and didn’t have a lot of extra time to work on larger projects we set up a basic weekend work schedule of shooting one day and editing our footage the next.

When we began these videos there was an insistence on not taking ourselves, or the process of making the work too seriously. If we wound up with something we could screen at festivals or show to our friends for a laugh that was sort of enough. Anyways, I had just gotten out of grad school and the last thing I wanted to do, or even think about was making art.
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the last word in lonesome is me

Home. It was always about home. It was about the family and the veneer of simple country life. Then there was another war. And when they came home, it wasn't back to their rural home. They returned to the city. And then it wasn’t about home anymore; it was about the city and about being detached, about being alone.

This is the basic premise behind The Last Word in Lonesome is Me. Set up as a three channel video projection that shifts perspectives and narrative chronology, this project analyses the fallout of country music’s move from the country to the city.

Using the soundtrack of Eddie Arnold’s, The Last Word in Lonesome is Me, Faron Young’s I Guess I had too Much to Dream Last Night and his cover of Hello Walls, and Jimmy Reeves, Make the World Go Away, these videos investigate this geographic and the psychological move cross country. Within all the videos, the viewer is confronted with contrasting images of rural and urban life. The images play off one another: suburban furniture is accompanied by black eyes and beefsteaks, birthday cakes contrast leaky ceilings and lonely highways, and their soundtracks mimic the fragmented persona of the lonesome, detached traveler.

This project initially grew out of my disdain for North American country music. Whether it was New Country, old time crooners, or sugary love ballads, I found it insipid and repetitious.

This extreme reaction seemed worth investigating.

I began by immersing myself into country music's various forms. I followed its history and its relation to other popular music: from traditional ballads to Old-Timey music, from Bluegrass to Opryland, and from Hee Haw to the highly polished "hat acts" of the 1990s. And like all forms of genre music, there is repetition, and sometimes it is tedious, biased and reactionary, but there are also several facets of its production and narrative that intrigued me. These included themes of being lost, detached and melancholy, the absurd wish to return both physically and metaphorically home, and the social implications of industry, post-war capitalism, and urban development on both the people who create this music and their listeners who consume it.
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demos, covers, and unreleased

demos, covers, and unreleased is a compilation of 20 videos produced over the last four years. Designed for festival screenings, these videos humorously investigate and experiment with literary, media, and music sampling.

demos, covers, and unreleased is an ongoing work in progress. These videos may be shown as a group or individually.
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preface

preface is rewriting of a popular text on Dutch immigration to Canada over the last century. I have changed each noun in the text to a pronoun. This work deals with moving from the particular to the general and the blurring of both "truth" and identity in the constructions and overlapping genres of fiction and history.
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52 used shirts

I own 52 slightly used shirts.
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13 instances

Using a series of found video and sound footage, 13 instances investigates teenage rebellion and isolation through the online diaries of teenage death metal enthusiasts.

These videos may be shown as a group or individually.
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the reluctant narrator

When Donald Rumsfeld briefed his press secretary on how to deal with the media he said, "begin with an illogical premise and proceed perfectly logically to an illogical conclusion. Then he said, "They [the media] do it all the time."

In constructing the narratives in these videos, we are juxtaposing the rational against the irrational through quotidian imagery of contemporary North American life.

In this collection, we introduce scenarios that are simultaneously familiar and opaque, and create a narrator who is anonymous and whose gender, ethnicity, age, and economic status is deliberately vague yet is defined by the characteristics with which it is associated.

The world we are creating is a world in which the reader is forced to suspend his or her disbelief, and at the same time asked to critique the ambiguity of the narrative that has been presented. The reader is then left to come to his or her own conclusions about not only what is true or believable but also what he or she understands to be the underlying message of the narrator.

This way of reading is similar to the way we decode media and information which is presented to us under the guise of a "narrator" that is unbiased and neutral but that is systematically partisan.

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the burning of the nauvoo temple (after carl christensen)

In 1992 Varg Vikernes of the Black Metal group Burzum set   fire to a series of churches in Norway.   Vikernes documented his fires and used these photographs for the promotion of his band and as a tool to instigate others to follow in his footsteps.   This triggered a spree of vandalism and arsons across Norway, Europe, and North America.

This video animates Carl Christensen's 1879 devotional painting, The Burning of the Nauvoo Temple. This collaborative project investigates the history of arson as a tool for rebellion, and the cyclical influence of music on youth violence, rebellion, and intimidation.

Animation by Jeremy Price
Original score by Sturm Husqvarna and Joachim Buchwild

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Installation

apparently/apparently not

apparently/apparently not is an installation composed of over three hundred individually cast and painted multiples produced over a six-month period. This installation investigates the futility of movement and the impossibility of flight by a herd of blind, mute, and oblivious creatures as they traverse their confined environment in a pathetic attempt to escape.

This installation grew out of a short story that I had written several years ago. In the text the protagonist is constantly second guessing himself, reflecting on each decision or action that he has made throughout his life, often concluding that each step he has taken forward, in retrospect was one of digression or descent. A life of apparent progress without progression.

In adapting this story into the present installation I was interested in how I could work metaphorically with the physicality of the creatures through their mutated anatomy, absurdly imprisoned within bodies that are unable to receive sustenance or perceive their environment, able only to express themselves through their slow, senseless journey.

Through the multiplication and variety of these creatures I wish suggest an open ended allegory to human struggles as we try to come to terms with both our personal and collective actions and decisions surrounding what we assume is progress, and the ceaseless repetitions we encounter as we blindly make our way through life, taking one step forward and at the same time one step backward as we move.

This installation is designed to be adaptable, just as the creatures themselves, to a variety of spaces. Each new installation finds the creatures recontextualized in different manners dictated by the spaces that they temporarily inhabit.
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Sound

shout outs

For two years I collected over 3000 live, bootlegged songs from the Internet. From these songs I separated and deleted all the music from the tracks, leaving only the asides, the introductions, and the words spoken by musicians to their audiences.

These spoken tracks were then intermixed into a multi-speaker sound installation.

h ey motherfuckers is a two-minute sound excerpt from this installation.
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Painting

start as you will go on


These painting are the first installment in a series of tangled, multi-media narratives that investigate the contradiction and biased construction of polemic speech. Using suburban dystopic imagery as their metaphoric subject matter, I, as the reluctant narrator, will contradict myself through a series sculptural propositions and video animations that refute the original paintings narratives.

Through this ongoing series of interconnected work I plan to walk around the truth as one might plan a birthday party for their unborn, eight-year old child.
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the nauvoo paintings

In 1992 Varg Vikernes of the Black Metal group Burzum set fire to the Fantoft Stave Church in Bergen Norway. Vikernes documented his fires and used these photographs for the promotion of his band and as a tool to instigate others to follow in his footsteps. This triggered a spree of vandalism and arsons across Norway, Europe, and North America.

Referencing the title of Carl Christensen’s 1865 painting, The Burning of the Nauvoo Temple, these paintings investigate the history of arson as a tool for rebellion, and the cyclical influence of music on youth violence, rebellion, and intimidation.

For exhibition, these paintings could also be reproduced as large-scale site-specific murals painted directly on the gallery walls.

All paintings are 18x24 inches.
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Digital Imagery

decoy

decoy is a series computer based images that grew out of my installation, apparently/apparently not. This installation, which consisted of over 300 double ended cast and hand painted creatures investigated the futility of movement and the impossibility of flight by a herd of blind, mute, and oblivious creatures as they aimlessly traversed their confined environment in a pathetic attempt to escape.

I was interested in the paradox of our collective decisions or actions as a society in terms of what we assume is progress and the possibilities of digression or descent as we blindly make our way through a contingent, uncompromising existence, taking one step forward and at the same time one step backward as we move through life.

decoy allegorically addresses questions surrounding progress, contingency, determinism, and negation through a series of open-ended narratives from the standpoint of the individual. By adapting and transforming these three dimensional miniatures into still images, I am interested in the metaphorical implications of the mutated anatomy of these creatures and their imprisonment within bodies that are unable to receive sustenance or perceive their environment.

By placing these creatures into a variety of absurd situations, I am compounding their sense of futility and their inability to reconcile movement or change. Situations where a step in any direction would prove fatal, upsetting the fine balance that they must maintain to simply exist.
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just the facts

just the facts are a series of images taken from Dragnet 1969, the most popular television detective show ever to be aired in North America. Without sound or narrative context, these images are the first-person point of view shots of Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb). Not only was Webb the main character in this program, he was also the director of this series.

Arranged chronologically, they are literally the facts that Friday collects and assesses throughout his investigations. Each set, or program of images represent one day of Friday's case roster. These images investigate issues surrounding the biases and privilege of authority, the social construction of vision, and the voyeuristic nature of television viewing.

Measuring 15x20", these images are roughly the same size as the television set I owned when I first watched Dragnet 1969.
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meniscus

It doesn’t occur all that often. A pendulum swings and the intended meaning of an image slips silently out the door. When this happens we are left in an odd circumstance of duality, knowing what we knew before and having to reconcile this with our new interpretations of an image. This is the basis of meniscus; the position of trying to find the median of these two diametrically opposed states of knowledge.

Sampled from the Vancouver Public Library’s collection of Leonard Franks’ Board of Trade photographs, these manipulated images play with the idea of keeping your head above water in the often slippery and overwhelming position of trying to interpret visual information.
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out of the frame

If a text or picture is going to represent a reality which is different from, and perhaps determinant of, the picture itself, then this representation will only be possible through an act of negation, through a demonstration of incoherence of the system of dominant images.

John Tagg, The Burden of Representation

Out of the Frame is a series of over 60 photographs derived from Leonard Frank’s Board of Trade commissioned, Industrial photographs of Vancouver.

For a four-month period, I was hired by the Vancouver Public Library to help create a database for the Leonard Frank Photo Digitization Project. I spent 40 hours a week scanning, documenting, and indexing Leonard Frank’s photographs. This database, composed of several thousand images, is seen as a key tool in allowing a larger audience access to the collection of Frank’s industrial photographs taken between the two world wars. This collection represents a wide range of historical images documenting both the ideological and physical index of modern progress in the development of the city of Vancouver. A cursory glance of the archive reveals images of commercial construction and expansion, the exploitation and processing of natural resources, and even the occasional opening of a bridge or pool

There are few images of people in this archive. In their infrequency they exist in two forms: composed portraits of industrial developers and their families or as incidental laborers who appear literally on the periphery or margins of these images. It is this second represented group that I began to question and investigate. In these “portraits” there are two common elements: human representations are dwarfed by the very objects they construct through their labor and each figures stares directly back at the camera that captures their image. They appear in the frame, though possibly imagine themselves, as many of us do when we do not see ourselves the subject of a photographer, out of the frame. They are physically represented by the very system that controls their labor and marginalizes their importance. Their common expressions of questioning and distain opens up an alternative avenue of historical investigation in this once determined map of history.

Out of the Frame attempts to represent this fissure of exclusion in a very specific historical document. Ironically it is only through the technological processes of digitization, image manipulation, and distribution that this exclusion can be revealed. By literally cropping out the material “objects” of Frank’s photographs, these portraits attempt to refocus the lens of history away from grandiose material production and onto the often the invisible makers of history.
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thirteen days

If anything, thirteen days is the suggestion or the possibility of narrative.

Whether viewed in a linear trajectory or a fragmented scanning, these images are an invitation for the viewer to construct a story from their disparate, unique, and somewhat peculiar film noirish suggestion and organization.

Culled from the Vancouver Public Library Archives, their only physical relation is the single arrow mapped across each image. The arrows act a means to suggest a subject, a direction, or even detailed point of interest to continue, and at the same time complicate the narrative's possibilities.
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fantoft

Fantoft was the first of many churches burned in Norway during the rise of the Black Metal scene. This arson, attributed to Varg Vikernes of the band Burzum set off a spree of vandalism and arsons across Norway and Europe.

This mechanized print investigates the cyclical influence of music on youth violence, rebellion, and intimidation.

Each print spins slightly slower than 33 1/3 rpms.
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Drawing

from the womb to the tomb

from the womb to the tomb is a series of drawing derived from online tattoo galleries posted by death metal fans. These images were manipulated with Photoshop to remove the figure and then enlarged into graphite on paper drawings. The distortion of the text is a result of how the tattoo conformed to the contours of the body.

All drawings are 22x30 inches.
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south of heaven

Originally developed to augment the narratives presented in the video, 13 Instances, (please see above) these drawing are based on imagery from a variety of online Death Metal fan’s zines, blogs, and personal diaries.

The high-contrast, and often degraded imagery is a visual reference to hand-made and photocopied underground Death Metal demo tapes and zines produced by bands to circulate and promote their music.

All drawings are 44x30 inches.
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Print

the nauvoo suite

In 1992 Varg Vikernes of the Black Metal group Burzum set fire to the Fantoft Stave Church in Bergen Norway. Vikernes documented his fires and used these photographs for the promotion of his band and as a tool to instigate others to follow in his footsteps. This triggered a spree of vandalism and arsons across Norway, Europe, and North America.

Referencing the title of Carl Christensen’s 1865 painting, The Burning of the Nauvoo Temple, these prints investigate the history of arson as a tool for rebellion, and the cyclical influence of music on youth violence, rebellion, and intimidation.

Each print is approx. 30x24 inches.
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