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Casual Viewings
Artists: Germaine
Koh (Canada) and Richard
Grayson (England-Australia)
March 24 - April
2, 2000
One 1999 work by
each artist is featured- calculated points-of-view of "ordinary” as it
happens incidents with no discernable beginning or end.
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The
idea for Richard Grayson’s video, ahistoryofreading, “came
out of nowhere”
(his words). He emptied the shelves of books in a New York
studio -
where he was staying -- arranged them for their witty title and
cover
association, and lined them up to be video-taped being pushed down,
one by
one. The camera perspective was inspired by teen horror-films: the
camera
taking the predator point-of-view. Projected on a wall-size scale,
Grayson
‘s video has the look of a cheap and absurd horror film, and the
audio
track, the “thud” of each book as it drops to the floor. The title
comes from
one of the books, Alberto Manguel’s “A History of Reading”.
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Germaine
Koh’s installation, with a 6.5 hour video track, is titled Side
piece.
She recorded the comings and goings at two public benches outside her
Paris
residence studio. Koh writes: “Four
men sit, in various combinations, on two public benches. They talk,
read, eat,
drink, and watch passing action. The weather changes, other
unknown
people come and go, events occur off-frame, and days become nights.
At the
same time, the sound track conveys the ambient sounds and
conversations
occurring within the room in which the camera was located,
revealing
the equally mundane daily activities of this household.”
The 6.5 hour long video
plays on a small monitor placed inconspicuously on one
side of a counter mounted in the Kelowna Art Gallery’s public space.
As Koh
writes, it provides “more company than entertainment” but also has a
Hitchcockian
‘rear window’ point of view.
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One of several links between
the works is the hallucinatory after-image: the side effect for the generations
who grew up watching television and with television "being on", in the
age of ubiquitous video surveillance.
The
artists have exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. This is
Richard Grayson's first exhibition in Canada. Germaine Koh was included in a
Globe and Mail feature article, November 6,1999, as one of eight young Canadian
artists "who will carry us into the next century."
Casual
Viewings will travel to other Canadian galleries in 2000 and 2001.
The Kelowna Art Gallery
acknowledges the assistance of A
& B Sound, Kelowna,
in
the presentation of this exhibition.
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