Environments

By Adam Thomas

Friday February 25, 2005

Meaning Is Where You Find It

This Saturday at the ButcherShop gallery is the eighth installment in a series of audio/visual events called environments. Bringing together six emerging experimental artists, the evening will feature video and musical compositions by Granny’Ark, Mark Brady, Lee Hutzulak, Aidan Cry, Michael Edwards and Stephanie Loveless. Loveless is a recent arrival from Montreal who will be presenting her first Vancouver offering.

A couple of her previous works were short visual pieces that played with the medium of film itself. Most of her visual work, including immaterial, was originally shot on video, projected and filmed on a roll of super8 film. The film was hand processed and paint and nail polish were applied. The result is a moving translucent foreground that continually conceals and reveals an image of a girl dancing on a rooftop. The images are paired with an electro-acoustic sound piece she composed for the work. In fact, the electro acoustic music composition aspect of her experimental work is finding its way to the forefront. In her contribution to the environments show, her latest work titled in transition is taking its lead from the musical composition. Running somewhere in the 25 minute mark it promises to be a bold and exciting step. I found her at Video In where we shot the shit a little bit.

ONLY: What draws you to focus on particular loops and images?

Stephanie: The experimental side of expressing things just seems to make more sense to me. For example, the film immaterial began as a big conceptual thing, but then as I was looking at the footage there was just this one clip that I wanted to watch over and over again, and that was what I wanted to be the film, that was what excited me. With this new work I had shot some footage of my grandmother’s hands and when I was hand processing it in the bathroom I accidentally flashed it and some of it is now really faded and I really like it. So I kind of just found the image and it wasn’t even what I had intended.

ONLY: It’s great when you don’t have a firm plan and you allow the medium to guide you and the result is something that you didn’t predict, but it’s the best thing that could have happened.

S: That’s exactly why I love shooting and hand processing super 8.

ONLY: With the films immaterial and movements, you use the same footage differently.

S: Yeah, I guess it was a result of me wanting to re-examine the original image, but again, with movements I originally started out with other things in mind, with the idea of only using a little piece of the image from immaterial, but then as it developed I discovered that that was all I needed.

ONLY: This new piece in transition was developed especially for this show, was there anything specific or different to your approach? Where did you start?

S: I started working with these two things that I had in my mind. I had this 38-second clip of a piano composition and a few rolls of film. One of the differences with this piece is that the musical composition aspect has taken the lead. Where before I would put together the film and then compose music to accompany it, this time I’ve been composing music first and putting the images together in relation to the music. With in transition, I was influenced by Alvin Lucier’s Sitting in a Room, and I took my little clip and played it through speakers into the bathtub and recorded it. Then I played that back and recorded it. But this piece is longer than anything else I’ve done and just thinking about composing something of that length is really challenging