ONE SAME, SAME THING
Jan Peacock
Opening on Thursday, October 16 at 5 p.m.
The exhibition runs from October 16 to November 15, 2003.
Artist Talk sponsored by Concordia University Studio Arts Visiting Artist
Program
Tuesday, October 14 at 12:30 p.m. at the Visual Arts Building, Room VA-210,
1395 René-Lévesque West.
For more than twenty years, Jan Peacock has been building a video archive
of experiences, both observed and constructed. From these many hours of
footage she extracts “bits of flow” to craft video compositions
in time, image and language, which are then situated in furniture, signage
and architecture. These more tangible elements --chairs, billboards, and
walls-- serve as anchors to the fleetingness of video, even as video itself
is used to anchor memory.
Peacock’s renowned video installation Reader by the Window used video extracts from seven years of walks taken in Canada, the United States, Japan, France and the United Kingdom; it speculated on the interplay of memory and cognition in experiencing the familiar in unfamiliar places. In This walk, these steps, a male performer and a female performer use their tongues to push out single words printed on slips of paper, their actions intercut to the cadence of an argument. Silent and blind (their eyes are banded with slowed video footage of strangers who brush past each other in a public garden), they inadvertently narrate the end of desire, intimacy, and the will to understand.
At Dazibao, Peacock will present a new video installation, One same, same thing, whose parts are embedded in an architecture that conceals and exposes, and where texts converse and converge on near and distant surfaces. The installation features a specially constructed wall, which runs the length of the gallery, forming a relatively shallow viewing area. An oblong shape cut from the wall reveals, almost fully, an expansive projection of a hand passing over gravel. Peacock conceives of this passage as both drawing and reading, and, while beautiful, the image is also brutal, suggesting as well the possibility of an attached, living body being dragged, relentlessly, through time.
Several small openings in the wall contain tiny LCD screens where material from Peacock’s archive is played out against performed actions. The projection is grand, far, partially obscured; the screens tiny, near, visible in full. Though their source material is substantially different from that of the projection, Peacock refers to these as details. In a sense, they are the details that inform the larger view through their associative value, emblematic of thought and thought’s annihilation, of language and its shadow, resistance and failing.