Christine Stewart
The Pearl
Faith Moosang
March to May
The Helen Pitt Gallery ARC facilitates public outreach initiatives, projects, experimentation and dialogue concerning contemporary art and community whenever possible. In between the first two exhibition programs of the 2004 Fall season we will be hosting two SFU MFA Projects: These projects will be open to the public free of charge from Oct. 13 – 16, 12-5pm (Opening Tuesday, Oct. 12, 7pm). There will be a closing reception for the projects Saturday evening, Oct.16.
“The occupation is by the media. We are occupied by teletechnologies and we must be part of the resistance.”
— Paul Virilio
March to May is primarily an exploration into the spatial and temporal dislocation of the official Iraq War – March 19th, when the bombing of Baghdad commenced, to the May 1st declaration of victory by George Bush. Sourced from a viewing of over 200 hours of archived television coverage, each photographic image manifests as a durational record of approximately 10 to 15 seconds of selected real-time segments of the televisual event. The extended exposures lend themselves to visual abstraction and, by extension, theoretical and political obfuscation of referent. A purposeful disavowal, whose intent is the denial of a place of purchase. This piece has antecedents in the works of the two avant-gardes, but pushes their inquiries with spatial deconstruction into contemporary artistic concerns with that of the temporal. Here, that is largely seen in the conflation of the real-time it takes to wage wars, stage battles and the hyper-fluidity of satellite transmission. Geography and time-zones play their part. What day is it in Iraq? When did this particular assault take place? Yesterday? Today? Tomorrow? It slips into the surreal.
Faith Moosang is an artist who mostly lives and works in Vancouver. She received her BFA from Emily Carr in 1995 and is currently completing her MFA at Simon Fraser’s School for the Contemporary Arts. She works in photography, film, video and installation. Her curatorial work with photography has taken her across Canada and she is currently working on a SSHRC grant contemplating the creation of the scenic view. She is also the co-founder of the Nancy Drew Research Institute.
The Pearl is a shifting, narrative collage in which multiple truths are presented through a multi-actor, split-screen monologue projection. Essentially an exploration of how narrative and information are conveyed, The Pearl contemplates the negotiation of meaning that occurs within human interactions, and how content is fragmented and manipulated by media. Through handset and keypad, the viewer is invited to trace an investigative path of their choosing. Varied stories – and truths – emerge depending upon the viewer’s point of entry, level of interaction, and interpretation. Finding the truth is elusive.
Christine Stewart is a Vancouver based media artist and educator whose work has shown throughout North America and Europe. Her projects address the nature of perception and categorization through digital technology and viewer interaction. She holds a BFA in Film/Video from Emily Carr and is currently completing an MFA at Simon Fraser University.
