...in a dark wood

description

In a dark wood... is a large 32'X9' two-channel video installation . It begins as a still photograph of a long stretch of douglas fir trees, evenly spaced and exactly the same, reminiscent of a classical colonnade, prison bars, a film strip. Darkness falls in the woods and the trees spin around to the sound of a roulette wheel. When they stop, the spaces between the trees are filled with a montage of appropriated footage pertaining to BC.  Two notes of music emanate from the scenes for a short time, before they disappear and the forest starts to spin again. The timing of the spinning and and stopping begins as synchronized between the channels,  then increasingly falls out of sync.

 The footage comes from three sources:

 1. Excerpts from the 1914 silent film "In the Land of the Headhunters" made by Edward Curtis. Part ethnography and part melodrama, "it was the first feature-length film to exclusively star Native North Americans (eight years before Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North). An epic story of love and war set before European contact, it featured non-professional actors from Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) communities in British Columbia" (http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu/index.php)

 2. Excerpts from a private "home movie" dated 1927 from the Vancouver Archives: "three amateur films documenting a private costume party at the Hamber residence at 3838 Cypress Street (Vancouver). The film shows footage of Aldyen Hamber and a costumed Eric Hamber with 6 unidentified female guests wearing costumes and playacting a harem love scene." (http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/archives/webpubhtml/qbes/MovingImages/MI-13...)

 3. Handheld amateur footage of gardens, dated 1931, also from the Vancouver archives. This footage uses an unusual early color technology that involves placing filters over the projector to make the color visible.

 The twin themes of chance and performance (playacting) are woven into the piece, much as, visually, one rigid mechanic depiction of the landscape is woven through with another that is constantly moving in different directions at once. Both the latter depictions side-step the conceptual tradition of landscape as a topography of the social and lingering romantic echoes of landscape as sublime.

 Each Loop sequence begins with excerpts from the footage that are narrative, moves into scenes that are increasingly focused on the swaying landscape and ends with excerpts that carry the visual signs of the materiality film: scratches, stains, burned out  areas.