Artist Mark Soo (BFA 2001) will give a talk in April on the occasion of his solo opening at the Surrey Art Gallery (SAG). The talk will dig into Mark’s practice, as well as into the dual-channel video and sound installation that makes up the SAG’s spring show, Mark Soo: Twilight on the Edge of Town, which opens April 17.

“I’ve tried to make a work that speaks to a complicated relationship to where we are, and of how we perceive that in terms of time and the relation to space,” Mark says in a statement.

Twilight on the Edge of Town builds on Mark’s abiding interests in photography and film, and in the history of social movements, according to the SAG. The work, which unfolds over 25 minutes across multiple screens, likewise advances his ongoing experimentation with the technological image.

“Holographic images depict objects and events of the seemingly everyday where surreal log jams and raindrops mingle with flickering streetlights and backyard scenes,” writes the SAG. “An ambient soundtrack includes the voices of a child and adult simultaneously narrating the images, one in a speculation on the future and the other in a recollection of the past. Experienced in an ambiguous present, remembrance slips into projection and past and future are intertwined.”

Twilight on the Edge of Town seats itself somewhere in the nexus between theatre, experimental cinema, and art installation, the SAG continues. But the work isn’t simply an exercise in formal experimentation; SAG curator Jordan Strom notes Twilight points directly to the shared and singular experience of the human condition.

“By experimenting with the relationship between image and sound, fact and fiction, Soo’s large-scale environment is a compelling meditation on the nature of individual and collective memory,” he says.

Twilight is one of 200 projects funded in part through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. In the fall of this year, Surrey Art Gallery and Wirklichkeit Books, Berlin, intend to co-publish a catalogue on the exhibition.

Mark Soo: Twilight on the Edge of Town will be on view at the SAG from April 17 through June 6, 2021. You can catch his artist talk at 1pm on April 17 via the SAG’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. The lecture will also be available for replay afterwards.