Aletheia’s Veil

Charles Stankievech

Opening on Thursday, November 15 at 6 pm
The opening will follow a performance by the artist

The exhibition runs from November 15 to December 15, 2007
The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5pm

Residency project realized in the context of a special collaboration with PRIM

Aletheia’s Veil is constructed around the concept of the luminous rectangle of the cinema screen as an infinite scape where anything and everything is possible: the ground zero of utopia. Through a complex interplay between revelation and concealment, between what is present and what is hidden, the screen radiating with pure white light of time exposed becomes a gateway to consciousness, to the truth (aletheia) accessible at that precise moment when something slowly begins to uncover. Aletheia’s Veil captures that process.

For this exhibition, Charles Stankievech returned to a Montreal landmark – Cinéma Impérial – to revisit the experiment of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto epitomized by his Theatre Series. Stankievech reverse-engineered Sugimoto’s frozen process by introducing motion to the shot, zooming his camera lens into an empty screen thus slowly pushing the cinema interior out of the frame until the architecture vanishes leaving only a white field of light.

The artist has then transformed the footage into a 2-channel video installation. Two projectors show, respectively, the screen and the architecture of the theatre. Together, the synchronized images, projected onto a translucent silk screen, create a composite image of the film initially projected or, more accurately, of its absence. The viewer is confronted with the materiality of pure light.

The last groove on a 1915 record entitled They Don’t Believe Me serves as the soundtrack for the installation. A wash of white noise coincides with the wide-angle shot of the interior of the theatre and, together, image and sound evolve through abstraction to a material presence: pure light and pure tones. On the evening of the opening, a live concert by Charles Stankievech will incorporate the record into a performance solely interested in manipulating the materiality of the recording medium.

A second work by Charles Stankievech, Möbius Serum Albumin, will also be presented as part of this exhibition. This kinetic sculpture, comprised of a projector and a film loop in the form of a möbius strip, which bears traces from the artist’s own blood, embodies a self-referential process – a looping back of and on the self.

Charles Stankievech is the third artist to benefit from the exceptional opportunity offered conjointly by PRIM and Dazibao to produce and diffuse work. Every year, a special call for proposals invites artists, for whom the photographic practice crosses over into video and audio media to submit their project.

The artist would like to thank the Banff Centre and Cinéma Impérial for their generous collaboration.

Dazibao thanks the artist for his generous collaboration and its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec.