Books, conceived and directed by Patrick Blenkarn, is a performance with and about books. Over 70min, four performers perform a series of tasks with books upon an empty stage. In the process, they sculpt an encounter of ideas and images: of chaos, of devotion, of exhaustion, of knowledge.
"Grey Matter", a forty-two minute, 4-movement suite for string quartet and Disklavier (Yamaha's automated piano), ambiguously explores themes of aging (and the body's attendant neural/psychic deterioration and social alienation) in the age of automation, digital technology and artificial intelligence. Another thematic layer implies the following questions: will the roles of creative and performing artists become obsolete, like so many other professions are feared to become, with accelerating automation and artificial intelligence? Is technology bestowing upon us a utopian or dystopian future? Conceived with symmetrical harmonic processes, the work layers and juxtaposes sequentially diminishing harmonies (and diminishing performance personnel) with contrapuntal procedures. Alluding to a wide range of historical sources as disparate as Joseph Haydn, Robert Schumann, Béla Bartók, Charlie Chaplin, Kurt Vonnegut, Lee "Scratch" Perry and Spike Jonze, "Grey Matter" culminates with a collage of Bachian and Lisztian materials feeding back and reverberating through circular 4-channel electroacoustic diffusion.
"Waves" is a short narrative film with a duration of 14 minutes, shot on 16mm film. It shows a child and her young mother struggling to take care of one another in the small bedroom they share. Years later, the daughter returns to find solace in the embrace of a childhood friend. The "Installation of film footage and recorded sound" is a response to some of the questions raised through the making of the short film. Through it, I am reinterpreting the material recorded during the production of "Waves" beyond the restrictions of montage. Using broad strokes, I am looking to see where narrative falls apart and what survives its shattered logic.
Shimmering between here/there, self/other, now/then, Other Inland Empires is a stage performance which traces the Jewish roots of surf culture from Europe to California and back again. Inspired equally by historical coincidence, autoethnographic field work, and exploration of site, the piece was developed through 14 months of writing and devising. With palm trees, fabric, and a roving green screen, four actors, an in-audience musician, and a director-performer transform a bare stage into a shifting landscape, while the audience watches from the comfort of beach chairs. Drawing from strategies of postdramatic theater, performative autoethnography, and audience relations to installation and site-based performance, this work aimed to create an oscillating space in which story and image double and re-double upon themselves, the fictional interrupts the real, and the personal grazes the political.
The Living Surfaces #2 – Rhythmic Wanders is the second of a series of video art projects that uses the projection mapping technique to make projections over sculptures created together with the projected content. In addition, these projects bring up questions regarding spatiality, musicality, movement, performativity and narrativity. In Rhythmic Wanders, I create an interactive multichannel video installation in which a sequence of 8 independent music video loops are projected over four sculptures used as a tridimensional screen. The music videos consist of a collection of beats, melodies and environments, collected from meetings with musicians I met in Canada, Brazil and the United States. Images and sounds, themselves derived from my affective memories of those location as well as my relations with the musicians, are assembled algorithmically as the visitor(s) wander(s) around the installation space filled with strategically positioned presence sensors.
BecauseWeAreUsedToLiving is a mediated performance that explores the parasitic process of its own creation. Parasites are often performing, reading their host's movements like a script in order to gain access into their carefully guarded boundaries. Once inside, the parasite can gradually throw off the hosting body's equilibrium, triggering feedback loops of systemic dissonance. Parasites are often documenting, investigating their host's bodies like auditors in order to find refuge within their highly organized machinery. Once incorporated, the parasite can merge with its host, spontaneously giving rise to ecological novelty. BecauseWeAreUsedToLiving is host to its own parasitism; through a network of precarious wormholes it feeds off itself across time. Using video, music, installation, text, and performance, the work presents its own process of transformation, which occurs across disciplinary and temporal boundaries. Through a methodological framework that is based on parasitic strategies of performance and documentation, BecauseWeAreUsedToLiving seeks to gain access to alternate universes.
This video features a re-enactment of a meeting between David Biddle and Linda Fox. The meeting took place in "Stanley Park".
This video features a customer testimonial for a virtual reality experience called "Lep-E Alternatives™".
A Walk for 09.09.17 was a walking practice that invited engagement of the senses through the geography of Vancouver and focused on being present. Traversing through Vancouver's Chinatown and Strathcona neighbourhoods, the work explored site as a composition and invited the audience into the role of performer/composer. The audience was lead through a preconceived path of which they were unaware and were encouraged to listen, breathe, walk, and practice being in the present moment together. Throughout the walk, performers were encountered in specific locations where they were musically improvising. The work explored methods of listening, invitation, and sharing (listening) experiences with others.
in several times is a choreography of space, memory and the body. Developed from personal stories, family history and nostalgic association, the work aims to create a place in which several times and environments can be remembered and acknowledged simultaneously. The process of creating this work began with a trip to spaces that held significance to my family, searching for traces of the past in the present, and the recollection of senses that connect my body to these spaces and my history. The work has been developed with the creative input of five performers, two sound designers and a lighting designer who meet in an ever evolving concert, enveloped in wafts of fresh dill and lemon. Presented in traverse arrangement, with two different sound spaces at either end of the corridor, the performance surrounds the viewer bringing them into the collective act and embodiment of remembering, recalling and sensing.
visiting hundun's territory is a sculpture that stands 3 m tall, 2 m wide, and 0.9 m deep. The sculpture is made up of several elements: a drawing cut into a screen, fluorescent lights, a plastic curtain, and automated fans. The sculpture breathes, blowing its curtain when it exhales and sucking it against a screen door when it inhales, revealing the abstracted drawing. As a research project, this work intersects Daoist philosophies, Islamic art practices, and contemporary theories to agitate settled concepts such as infinity, spontaneity, and spirituality. The work explores the relationship between knowledge and intuition; going beyond concepts of quantifiable knowledge and embodied knowledge in an attempt to think through a concept of non-discursive knowledge.
Video detailing visiting hundun's territory as installed in at the Audain Gallery, Vancouver, September 2017.
Mirror Staging the Seeing Place is a choreographic project that exploits the mechanics of image construction within the theatrical apparatus to reconfigure cultural representations that are embedded in the female body. Dually informed by practice- based research and an 18 month-long intellectual courtship with feminist psychoanalytic theory, the project centres around the figure of the dancer. Working with a movement base generated through a mimetic reproduction of North American pop-cultural icons from the 20th and 21st centuries and gender-specific stereotypes, the solo dancer performs a series of deconstructive actions that increasingly mutate the original forms. The scenography and sound are organized around this mimetic/deconstructive arc; the theatre space is captured and reflected in a long wall of mirrors, and the diegetic sounds are amplified, doubled, and displaced. The doubling and displacing of sight and sound troubles the reading of the body. The project plays with multiple perspectives on the female body, in order to revise (re-vision) how it can be seen.
The video documents the live performance of Mirror Staging the Seeing Place on June 1st, 2017 in Studio T, SFU.