Window Gallery: Life Support

Reception: Friday, August 30, 5-7pm

Life Support

LIFE SUPPORT is a media installation work made especially for the window space at Neutral ground. The work uses technology to track and observe common biological materials from moldy fruit to houseplants. Using digital photography and time-lapse techniques, the ever changing state of the materials present in the window are recorded and played back in such a way that we can start to understand these inhabitants of our biome on a more human timescale. Days become seconds as the film technology plays back a historical record of the life of the exhibition. The various mechanical interventions that manipulate the organic materials on display are there to guide the viewer in a cinematic sense and lend a structure to the otherwise experimental nature of the piece; it is difficult to predict what will happen during the course of the exhibition. The time based nature of this work makes it obvious it is an inherently futile effort to keep the temporal at bay. We are only privy to this glimpse of a moment in time that can be held up before time moves inexorably on.

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IAN CAMPBELL is a filmmaker and multimedia artist who works in video, installation and performance art. His short films have been screened across Canada at film and experimental media festivals such as Festival Du Nouveau Cinema (Montreal), WNDX (Winnipeg), Antimatter (Victoria), 8Fest (Toronto) and others in Europe and the US. He has presented performance work using live improvised projected video at artist run centres and performance venues across western Canada. He is currently based in Saskatchewan where he teaches film at the University of Regina.