"Still Films" March 23 to May 21, 2011, Yukon Arts Centre, Whitehorse
1 of 7
Wilderness of Elsewheres"
Yvette Poorter, "Wilderness of Elsewheres," 2002 – present, 16" X 20".
2 of 7
"Cliff Hanger (3)"
Mary Beth Edelson, "Cliff Hanger," series of three gelatin silver prints, 1978, 20" X 20".
3 of 7
"Cliff Hanger (2)"
Mary Beth Edelson, "Cliff Hanger," series of three gelatin silver prints, 1978, 20" X 20".
4 of 7
"Cliff Hanger"
Mary Beth Edelson, "Cliff Hanger," series of three gelatin silver prints, 1978, 20" X 20".
5 of 7
"Spinning Egg"
Nate Larson, "Spinning Egg," photograph, 2005, 12" X 18".
6 of 7
"Pendulum"
Nate Larson, "Pendulum," photograph, 2005, 12" X 18".
7 of 7
Wilderness of Elsewheres"
Yvette Poorter, "Wilderness of Elsewheres," 2002 – present, 16" X 20".
STILL FILMS
Jennifer Crane, Mary Beth Edelson, Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler, Nate Larson, Chris Marker, Edweard Muybridge, Alain Paiement, Yvette Poorter, Charles Stankievech, Mario Villeneuve, March 23 to May 21, Yukon Arts Centre, Whitehorse
BY: Jill Sawyer
There’s a persistent belief among cinema historians that Edweard Muybridge created the early technology for moving pictures to help a friend win a bet. The bet was about whether or not a horse picks all four hooves off the ground in a full gallop, so to prove the point, Muybridge figured out how to photograph each split-second step of a horse in movement, showing one frame of his friend’s horse, airborne. Taking the experiment further, he shot a series of frames of the horse in gallop (techniques he would later expand into groundbreaking studies of locomotion), which, seen seamlessly one after the other, produced a short film.
Muybridge’s early work is the best-known example of the phenomenon that still backs the concept of the moving picture — that each film is a series of still images, assembled in sequence to suggest motion. Lance Blomgren, curator of the show Still Films at the Yukon Arts Centre, is taking that concept back to its roots, finding current examples among a handful of contemporary artists, pulling together series of photographs that tell film-like stories.
Blomgren, who runs the residency program at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, began with the idea of finding narrative in photography. He had curated an earlier show at the Helen Pitt Gallery in Vancouver, about photographic techniques that created drama, and liked what he saw. “There are a lot of single images in contemporary photography,” he says. “There’s a lot of good work out there, but a lot of it also seemed really dry to me.” Blomgren wanted to spark some tension in the work he was pulling together, to find drama, suspense, and action, and it led him to the serial work in Still Films.
After Muybridge (whose work is represented in this show with a still from one of his locomotion studies, Two Men Wrestling, from 1887), the split between film and still photography grew ever-wider. Blomgren thinks photography took on a stasis that’s grown more pronounced as film technology has become more sophisticated, but his own enjoyment of photography comes from being able to slow down and examine the story in each frame.
Yukon artist Charles Stankievech takes this idea a step further, examining the moments in film that are between the story — he’s created his own film, Zeno’s Phantasies (Glenn Gould) out of the gaps between the scenes in an existing 1950s film of Glenn Gould playing the piano. It’s the only video piece in Still Films, and it underscores the narrative sense that Blomgren finds in the other works in the show.
In much of the work, there is a very definite sense that the viewer can create a narrative out of each set of stills. In Yvette Poorter’s Wilderness of Elsewheres series, recurring figures are literally torn out of the each frame — the viewer can construct a story from what’s left behind, and also muse on who has disappeared. Mary Beth Edelson’s Cliff Hanger, created in 1978, is deceptively simple — an object is thrown from a cliff, and the viewer has a perspective on it from underneath. But the motion created within the frame, and the amorphous quality of the object (is it a person? A blanket? A person wrapped up in a blanket?) gives the three-frame series a weight, and instantly sparks the imagination.
In Seafarers and Fishwives, by Saskatoon-based artist Jennifer Crane, the work is interactive on the most low-tech scale. The series includes a 19th-century stereopticon effect, with antique sea-related photographs, paired with the artist’s own cartes de visite, in which she has dressed in period garb. Viewers are invited to construct their own narratives in the way they order the photographs before looking. Mixing old techniques with new subjects, Crane blurs the line between truth and fiction, a note that Blomgren plays throughout the show.
“These artists try to complicate the difference between fiction and documentary,” he says. “Whether the work comes from raw snapshots, or staged scenes created with actors, even the most innocent documentary picture has been edited and framed. Does this one 250th of a second represent truth?”
He adds that regardless of the story behind each series, the leisure provided by still photography is difficult to resist. “This show relies on the lush seductiveness of the still photo,” he says. “It posits a way of seeing from before film and it shows that photography has a cinematic beauty. This was a chance to explore a historical antecedent, and to show contemporary artists working in that vein.”
It’s true that though the film versions of Muybridge’s work are mesmerizing in their simplicity, it’s his stills that give the viewer the true sense of discovery — as if a new story has just begun.
Yukon Arts Centre Public Art Gallery
300 College Dr (PO Box 16), Whitehorse, Yukon Y1A 5X9
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