Statement of Intent:
I am proposing a stop motion, digital video loop, titled Calibration. It will be approximately three minutes long and projected onto a wall at eye level. Photographic images of the public, the homeless, police officers and of surveillance cameras that loom overhead will be alternated with images of a sculpted brain, containing a numerical dial that calibrates after viewing the images. In this manner, the viewer will watch a figurative processing of the notion of public safety. The homeless are often projected as threats to personal safety and images of the public, the homeless and police will be screened with interchangeable worlds (threat and safe) scrawled over top, as both the police and the homeless can be viewed as either a threat or as being safe in relation to the public. There will be an audio component as well, comprised of the utterances safe and threat and audio clips from discussions on security.
The video will activate the grey area between critiquing institutional practices of surveillance while at the same time participating in it by recording and displaying the images of people who happen to be in the frame of the still images. As the Olympics approach and the streets are being prepped for international media and tourists, some people have taken notice of the implications of safety measures and the crackdown by police to rid the streets of “undesirables”. With this escalation of policing and surveillance leading up to the Olympics, the threats that these safety measures pose are becoming more apparent and this video will question our perceptions of safety and how different viewers come to interpret the same imagery as being a threat or as being safe.
Artist Bio:
I’m currently a fourth year visual art student at the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU. Themes in my work surround ethics, as well as emotional expression and repression in relation to socioeconomic constraints. Overcoming social barriers and stigma and vocalizing these issues have been a driving force for my work. In the past, my work took on the form of personal catharsis through figurative sculpture and now the direction of my work has expanded to the wider field of the human condition. I’m interested in exploring the formation of the conscience due to the collision of external forces in society. My artistic influences stem from the likes of Antony Gormley whose work investigates the body as device and site of transformation and Jenny Holzer whose work intercepts public space with provocative text.
I have worked extensively in the mediums of sculpture and photography and have recently begun to work in video. Working in video has opened up a new form of communication for me, allowing me to explore the performativity of the medium and to move beyond visual language, with the incorporation of audio. I hold an interest in the use of audio as a medium, while using the visual aspect of video as a support rather then the inverse. This is demonstrated in my video Business as Usual, 2009, where I used two sparse scenes with minimal visual cues and layers of audio that got progressively louder and became difficult to comprehend. Although the audio component was made up of clips of economic and environmental discussions, my intention was not to be didactic, but to evoke an emotional response to the timbre of the audio and rhythm of the video.