Patrick Bernatchez: Coming Soon
Patrick Bernatchez Pluton 2008 Video still
We are all familiar with the huge promotional blitz that anticipates big-budget Hollywood film releases—massive billboards, teaser trailers, flashy websites, festival buzz and even tabloid intrigue. In fact, these expert marketing props are often so bedazzling that the films themselves can become strangely secondary.
Montreal artist Patrick Bernatchez takes a closer look at that promotional catch-22 in “134340 SOON,” an exhibition that unpacks the concepts and constructs of the blockbuster marketing machine in a display of “advertising media” for a yet-to-be-made feature film. Consisting of a glossy poster, video trailer (presented on an iPod) and a sequence of monochrome colour bar prints, Bernatchez’s installation details, as he writes in an email, “a kind of sci-fi/B movie/Western/nouvelle vague film about the ultimate fight between Creationism and Darwinism.”
Patrick Bernatchez Pluton 2008 from Canadian Art on Vimeo.
It's a fantastic premise and the exhibition’s imagery is equally spectacular, from the poster shot of a simian face starring out of an Apollo-era space suit to the trailer’s explosive (and 2001: A Space Odyssey–inspired) sequence of astronaut-meets-monolith visuals. Of course, behind all of this remains the fact that Bernatchez's film, titled 134340, is still only a concept. These pseudo-promotional materials are all that exist. But it almost doesn’t matter: True to his critical point, Bernatchez has already hooked audiences for what may, or may not, be yet to come. (372 rue Ste-Catherine O #524, Montreal QC)
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Patrick Bernatchez "134340 SOON" 2009 Installation view |
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