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Rewind: “Transe atlantique”

Centre culturel Aberdeen, Moncton

There are things that video does really well, like taking advantage of our tendency to remember fragments—reconstructing, from the briefest of glimpses, a whole. Unconstrained by the dramatics of traditional film, yet still narrative, video lends itself to mirroring the way the mind works—associative and non-linear, yes, but sometimes also bratty, quirky, devious and rude. This blend of introspection and defiance can be compelling when a number of crafted visual worlds collectively collide.

“Transe atlantique” has scoured the Atlantic provinces for contemporary independent video. Curated by Stefan St-Laurent, the exhibition is part of the cross-country “Magnetic North” series from Halifax’s Centre for Art Tapes. Nine artists are included, with works ranging in style and technique. At one pole is James MacSwain’s Amoeba Culture (1989), a smart, satirical take on cultural critique that pushes the limits of animation through a pop post-narrative collage. At another pole there is Jan Peacock’s filmic (Bliss)(Dread) (1987), which overlays in sharp relief the sensuous contours of an unmade bed and audible confessions of desires and fears with banal news reports of tragedies and disasters.

Highly edited works such as Peacock’s stood out for the sheer adeptness of their interplay of what is heard and seen, as did Rodrigue Jean’s L’appel (1998), a minimalist cinematic exploration of intimacy and distance inspired by Jean Cocteau’s La voix humaine. As the work focuses on a male figure and his voice in a telephone dialogue with the lover who has just left him, the viewer becomes voyeur, interpreting and assessing veracity through the interaction between what is observed and said.

In this regional survey, landscape is less overtly geographical than shifting personal and cultural terrain. Even in Dana Inkster’s Welcome to Africville (1999) conventional documentary expectations are displaced as she evokes the intimate and contradictory ways biography and history intersect by placing fictive personal disclosures against the backdrop of archival footage of the community’s destruction.

Such dislocations between representation and identification are inevitable themes of the social margins, but the artists produce outcomes that differ greatly from one another. Donna Wawzonek’s dryly humorous ...dreaming (2002), for example, brings dreams of escape down to Maritime earth. While compulsively scratching lottery tickets, she recounts childhood dreams—crushing encounters with TV personalities Betty White and the Kids in the Hall. In Andrea Cooper’s Starring tapes (2002), the schism between the American star system and lived experience gapes wide as she recreates herself as a 50-foot glam movie siren wading in a Newfoundland harbour or lounging provocatively against the St. John’s skyline.

Some of the works are not new, but they seem new in this configuration. St-Laurent describes what takes shape as “weird geographies.” To my mind, the videos worked best at this intersection of old and new—drawing on raw experience, foregrounding memory and its usefulness, yet in a way very different from the mundane uses of the past that dominate the region. What emerges is a fresh, if slightly sobering, landscape of loss and desire. Supplementing each other without creating a perfect whole, the videos disturb and deepen an overall picture of the region.

Fall 2002

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