Scaping
Group exhibition.
LIA in Spinnerei, Leipzig.
September 2021.
Scaping was a group exhibition in the Leipzig International Art Programme in Spinnerei, a repurposed cotton spinning facility where I spent three months. I exhibited work mostly created from slides and slide projectors I had collected at flea markets around the city. With these pieces, I am interested in the competing and complementary aspects of media, history and memory.
Du temps perdu (Bread Factory) is an installation where a digital video is overlaid with a grid assembled from empty slide frames, 50x50 mm each. Inside each frame, a clip is playing from my personal archive of videos shot in Montréal from 2010-2011.
I studied in Montréal and lived in a loft in the low-income area of St. Henri. The loft (in an old textile factory, much like Spinnerei) went by the name Bread Factory and had done so for years, long before I moved in there. Along with my roommates Gregory Burton and Reuben Ward we shot scenes from our daily lives in the loft and around our neighbourhood. This was a transformative time for all of us, and my memories from those days have a strong intensity to them.
Here, they are framed as ‘magic’ animated slides, evoking both the joyful familial memories associated with the outdated slide format and the hazy melancholy which always haunts a bygone era. It is a fragmented portrait of a time and a place. Multiple moments unfold simultaneously, collapsing time and obsessing over certain incidents, much as happens in remembrance.
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Persisting Mnemonic Disorder is an installation with two slide projectors in which the lamps have been replaced by stroboscopic lights. A found image of a woman taking a photo is flashing out of sync with the very end of a color reversal film. The sprocket holes are prominent. The flashing lights, reminiscent of a camera flash or cinematic flashbacks, create drifting, hypnotic rhythms. A meditation on memory, photography and the relationship between the two.
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Untethered Memories is very much a work in progress. For now, it is an ongoing series of micro-collages/compositions made with found slide film, scotch tape, watercolour and my own slide photography, often of television static or other sorts of interference.
Also exhibiting work in Scaping were:
Caroline Thon
Christina Papakyriakou
Meita Melita
Nicolò Brezza
Theo Nugraha