Filling Time & Space: New Work by Richard Kerr

by Vicky Chainey Gagnon

One thing leads to another... Time to get reductive, you recalled the beginning when there was only light, time, space, and rhythm. You retool in mid-game and begin to make objects; now again one thing leads to the next. 1 --Richard Kerr

The new film cycle by Richard Kerr is based on the archives of popular culture: Hollywood movie trailers. Transposed from the drive-in cinemas of Saskatchewan to Kerr's Montreal studio, these trailers have become a malleable source for a visual arts exhibition--Industry--a multi-layered installation currently on display at the Cinematheque quebecoise in Montreal.

A celebrated Canadian film artist, Kerr is known for his wide-ranging body of work, an oeuvre that, since the early seventies, has explored a multiplicity of subjects in varying genres: poetic documentary (Hawkesville to Wallenstein, Canal); the political essay (The Last Days of Contrition, Cruel Rhythm); autobiography (never confuse movement with action, i was a strong man when I left home); structural landscapes (Plein Air, Plein Air Etude); and experimental narrative (On Land Over Water). He is an artist unafraid of change, speaking boldly about an artistic process that reacts first, and asks questions later: "I'm not starting out with a set agenda. Though, I think that inherently in [the] material there's a certain politic.. I [can] only steer and shape, turn inside-out." 2

Those at the Images Festival this year will certainly recall Kerr's offering, collage d'hollywood, an eight-minute film that is nothing less than a serious pastiche of the American film industry. Described as a "massively dense white-noise collage," 3 Kerr's extravaganza of accelerated cinema, collisions and psychodramatic refrains was born of a three-year investigation into a box of trailers acquired in the Prairies. The found materials were thoroughly transformed by Kerr and his collaborators,4 both literally and conceptually, via boiling, bleaching, melting and the chemical intervention of household cleaning products. The heavily processed A, B, C rolls of collage d'hollywood snap together neatly, forming a dense network of superimpositions that cleverly subvert the commercial film's vehicle for selling products. Snippets of science fiction thrillers, melodrama and other genres, meld together to produce a new kind of "product" that is clearly aligned with an avant-garde tradition in cinema.

With his new body of work, Kerr continues a shift--first witnessed in the early nineties--that saw his filmmaking practice slide right off the screen and into the arena of object-making and installation art. Two projects map this area of Kerr's practice, Overlapping Entries and The After Motion Picture Series.5 The former exhibition, shown at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, first displayed Kerr's now-signature motion picture weavings, consisting of boxes casting light that illuminate sheets of plexiglass upon which rest woven film. At the heart of the new work in Industry are the materials of collage d'hollywood, which have exploded into a mosaic of new forms, both accelerated and stilled. Like William S. Burroughs's cut-ups--essentially literary montage--Industry vigilantly disassembles and restructures movie trailers into radiant two- and three-dimensional objects. The three rooms of the Cinematheque bring forward four main components: a suite of six new motion picture weavings (lightboxes); Hollywood Decollage, a separation of the A, B, C rolls of collage d'hollywood that transfix the viewer with its elegant triptych of panoramic video space; and an eighty-minute, dual-projector slide loop which slowly dissolves film stills in counterpoint to adjoining sound/photography elements that, together, form the installation Demi-monde. On the whole, lush, and often feathery-looking images predominate and heighten the rapport with the surface of the film. All chemical interventions with the film stock have created images that are heavily reticulated, distorted and almost "dry looking," as if the desert sun had bleached the life out of the faces and bodies that we see. Folding back the layers of emulsion, frame-by-frame, from trailers from films such as The Cell, The Perfect Storm, and Pearl Harbor, produces a vision of contemporary life as a nervous system on the verge of overload.

Of all the works in Industry, it is the installation Demi-monde, with its strange abstract beauty, that left the greatest impression on me. Two large-format digital photo prints, Demi-Monde no.1 and Demi-Monde no.2, created from photogrammes and painted over with beeswax, are set against each other on the left and right walls with the dual slide projection centered between them. The projection is narrow and approximately fourteen feet tall, with the neighbouring photographs each measuring about 1/4 of that size. The projection itself is like a totemic form, while the combined effect of the photographs and projection constructs an appealing pyramid shape in the visual field. The slides were initially created by cutting film scraps and answer prints from collage d'hollywood. These were subsequently mounted into two-frame segments, and selectively painted with inks and dyes, and/or bi-packed together to form additional depth in the image. The palette for the three works is generally dark, composed of reds, blues and yellows that are muted, with occasional concentrated points of saturated colour. Due to the melted effect of the emulsion, the shapes in the images are fluid and the movement dynamic. The overlapping effect of the dissolves, from one slide into another, produces a thickening effect that momentarily builds the surface and then collapses again into a single image. Faces seem to be sliding off of the screen, reinforcing the notion of a "half world" that the title suggests. There is a fragility in the film stills, amplified by huge, distorted and hollow-looking eyes that stare back at the viewer. The horizontality of the dual images, and the choice of palette is reminiscent of Mark Rothko's paintings.

The sound component of Demi-monde adds texture to the installation with its languid and minimal ambient sound. A part of me, however, craved the solitary rhythmic clicking of the slides slipping tidily into position in the tray. It is as if the trauma of the distorted faces already registers a kind of noise in the viewer. A tension is created by the competing sounds, though, that adds to the experience of dischord and liminality that Kerr constructs in the installation.

The animation of film stills to a rhythm different than the usual 24 fps in Demi-monde caused me to reflect on how the apparatus (in this case, the rhythm of the slide projector's set speed) assists in how we perceive film. Time has slowed down in the installation, to the point of becoming absolutely still and permanently fixed in the beeswax-covered photographs, creating an effective lead-in to the inherent stillness of the motion picture weavings Kerr has created. Six sculptures made of metal, wood, light and woven film rest inside the first room of the exhibition space, with a smaller lightbox, collage de hollywood 3.0, hung right outside the entrance. The palette of the lightboxes inside the gallery is generally monochromatic, with specks of colour punctuated throughout. Suspended magnification devices hang from each lightbox, making for a participatory experience for the viewer. The surplus of detail in each piece, which have names like Hollywood Turns Light Into Money, Pleasantville and In Fear, entrances the eye. They are truly luminescent and beautiful sculptures of light. From a distance, the flattened film strips look like a single frame, and it is only in moving one's body and one's eyes over the surface of the lightbox that movement is achieved. Once more, Kerr makes the viewer think about the materials of cinema and how our bodies interact with them to feed our perception. The use of fluorescents creates an undulating light, making for a synaesthetic experience. Formally, the visual pattern of light from each piece--they are all 60" wide x 24" high--produces a unity in the space that repeats the consistency of the weavings across each lightbox.

With the motion picture weavings, Kerr restores the viewer to the material of film itself. Such is also the case in the nine-minute DVD loop, Hollywood Decollage, where the A, B, C rolls of collage d'hollywood are separated and spatially extended across a landscape of three screens. The film that birthed the elements of Industry is returned to its single stream of information. Editor Brett Kashmere describes the thematic behind the three montages in Hollywood Decollage: a prelude--a short video re-mix of the film, alternating between one, two, and three frames; the abridged A-B-C rolls displayed separately back-to-back-to-back, and then at-once, split into a synchronized triptych; and, in the third screen, a complete widescreen version of collage d'hollywood. When watching the remix, a violent force seems to be projected at the viewer. The sheer speed of the montage clutches the body kinesthetically. Every rapid-fire sequence, every bomb and flash of text seems a threat to safety. The absence of the superimpositions of collage d'hollywood makes for a far different cinematic reading. Instead of feeling the film on your face, as was Kerr's vision with his short film, there appears to be a little bit more room to breathe and reflect. The panoramic triptych activates a form of visual reading that encourages scanning across the planes of the three screens: the corner of your eye glimpses a slice of action, or an interesting colour gradation, so you turn your attention to the left for a minute, and then perhaps to the right when something else enters your visual field. The visual tension generated by not being able to absorb all the information on the three screens at once is an important part of Hollywood Decollage. This element reinforces the reality that cinema is a time-based art, and thus we need to invest time when reading it. And, as is the case with Hollywood Decollage, we must view the loop repeatedly to have access to the content.

Oscillating between immobility and pure velocity, the multimedia project Industry continues Kerr's investigations into the materials of cinema, how we perceive it, and the American landscape. Kerr's destruction/reanimation of Hollywood's byproducts creates a new kind of product, constructed especially for visual arts consumers like you and me. Enjoy!

Richard Kerr's Industry is curated by Brett Kashmere and is on exhibit from November 4 to January 23, 2005 at Montreal's Cinematheque quebecoise (335 boul. De Maisonneuve Est, Montreal, QC). The exhibition is accompanied by a screening of short experimental films 6 and a DVD-format catalogue featuring essays by Bart Testa, Willam C. Wees, Randolph Jordan, Gerda Johanna Cammaer, William C. Wees and others. For more information: http://cinema.concordia.ca/industry.

Thanks to Brett Kashmere for details and assistance

Notes

1. Richard Kerr, quoted in Squareheads, exhibition catalogue (Toronto: YYZ Artist's Outlet, January 13-February 13, 1999) p.16. 2. Randolph Jordan, "INDUSTRY: An Interview with Richard Kerr," Synoptique 5 (November 1, 2004) http://www.synoptique.ca/core/en/print/industry

3. Liam Lacey, The Globe and Mail (April 15, 2004)

4. Brett Kashmere and Michael Rollo are former students of Kerr's from the University of Regina. Kashmere is credited in the three year project that led to Industry with the montage for collage d'hollywood and Hollywood Decollage. Rollo is credited with the images for collage d'hollywood. When I asked Kerr about his collaborations on the Industry project he described them as a new form of authorship that he would like to continue with future projects.

5. The After Motion Picture Series is a suite of five lightboxes made in the mid nineties and presented in an exhibition curated by Lee-Ann Martin at the MacKenzie Gallery in Regina in the autumn of 1998. Overlapping Entries, curated by Cindy Richmond, was a mixed media installation with accompanying film retrospective presented at the MacKenzie Gallery Regina (spring, 1993) and the Edmonton Art Gallery (spring, 1994).

6. Trouble: Hollywood Viewed by the Avant-Garde Cinema Curated by Astria Suparak & Brett Kashmere Sunday, January 23, 2005, 6:00 pm

Home Stories (Matthias Mueller, Germany, 1991, 16mm, colour, 6 min.) Alone Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, Austria, 1998, 16mm, b&w, 14 min.) Fast Film (Virgil Widrich, Austria, 2003, 35mm, colour, 14min.) A Movie (Bruce Conner, USA, 1958, 16mm, b&w, 12 min.) Her Fragrant Emulsion (Lewis Klahr, USA, 1987, 16mm, colour, 10 min.) Moving Picture (Linda Christanell, Austria, 1995, 16mm, colour/b&w, 11 min.) Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 1999, 35mm CinemaScope, b&w, 10 min.) collage d'hollywood (Richard Kerr, Canada, 2003, 35mm, colour, 8 min.)

Vicky Chainey Gagnon is Assistant Curator at the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop's University in the Eastern Townships, Quebec and specializes in the history and practice of avant-garde filmmaking