Placing Spaces, Spacing Places
Canadian Experimental Films & Videos since 1990

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Foreword
by Ingrid Jenkner

Spacing Places is the sequel to Changing Times, the film and video series presented by MSVU Art Gallery in Spring 2002. Whereas
Changing Times concentrated on time as a theme and formal component in contemporary film and video, Spacing Places invites audiences to navigate screen space.

Series curator Gerda Cammaer has assembled an impressive program of recent works by established and emerging media artists. The program is divided into three parts. Each part surveys the on-screen framing of a broadly defined category of spatial experience: “home,” “travel,” and “ intimate spaces.” The artists use sound, framing, editing, and other techniques that shape screen space to comment on the politics and poetics of location. The Spacing Places selections also share pronounced reflexive tendencies. Thus a fourth type of spatial relationship, “critical distance,” emerges as the leitmotif of the program.

One of the highlights of the series is Michael Snow’s Living Room (2000). The entertaining anti-realism of this film, which combines cinematic tricks with digital animation, exemplifies the inventiveness of Canadian independent media production. We are also proud to include, as part of the third screening, a retrospective of videos by Nikki Forrest in which questions of place are central.

Spacing Places was organized in collaboration with La Femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman), a curatorial collective dedicated to the presentation of independent film and video in a visual art context. The members of the collective are the filmmakers Gerda Cammaer and Barbara Sternberg, and me. In addition to my colleagues in the collective, and on behalf of MSVU Art Gallery, I acknowledge with thanks the assistance provided by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Atlantic Filmmakers Co-operative. I am also deeply grateful for financial support received from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Table of Contents

Program:
1. Shooting at Home: sight seeing, open houses and “living” rooms

A Floating House 2002 Paulette Phillips (video)
Autobiography 1994 Dennis Day (video)
C’t aujourd’hui qu’ 1999 Manon Labreque (video)
You are in the Maze of twisty Little Passages, All Different 2002
Daniel Cockburn (video)
Happy House: The Id, the Kid and the Little Red Fireman.
A Clean Sweep. 2001 Gunilla Josephson (video)

B Living Room 2000 Michael Snow (16mm)
Sight Under Construction 2001 John Kneller (16mm)

2. Travelling Shots: Explorations in Screen Space

A Japan: Kessei Line Single Take 2001 Ian Toews (16 mm)
Las Escaleras 1999 Paul Landon (video)
Petropolis 2001 Michael Yaroshevsky (video)
New York Counterpoint 2002 Barbara Sternberg (video)

B Traversée 1999 Jean Théberge (16mm)
Transfixed 2001 Jason Britski (16mm)
Chimera 1995 Phillip Hoffman (16mm)
Four corners 1996 Ian Toews (16mm)
Nocturne 1996 Michael Crochetière (16mm)
Trans(e) Bleu 2000 Emanuel Avenel and Marie-France Giraudon (video)

3. Close-ups: Moving Images and Intimate Spaces

A Window/Fenêtre 1997 Nelson Henricks (video)
You = Architectural 1991 Kika thorne (video)
The View Never Changes 1996 John Price (16mm)
Live to tell 2002 Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (video)
The Invention of a Landscape 1998 Serge Cardinal (16mm)
Je changerais d’Avis 2000 Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (video)

B Static 1995 Nikki Forrest (video)
Shift 1997 Nikki Forrest (video)
Stravaig/Errance 1999 Nikki Forrest (video)
00:00:15;00 2002 Nikki Forrest (video)
Drift 2002 Nikki Forrest (video)

Foreword — Ingrid Jenkner
Acknowledgements — Gerda Johanna Cammaer
“Exploring Flatland: from Transmission to Transvision” — Gerda Johanna Cammaer