Videotape >

Canada Shadows

October 31st, 1983 > Martin Bartlett, Hank Bull, Kate Craig, Glenn Lewis and Patrick Ready

Record Description

Programme
Media
Type of Production
Western Front Production
Support
Artist in Residence
Distribution
Available from Video Out Distribution.
Number of Copies
1
Length
25 minutes

Content Description

‘This video tape is not so much a documentation as a translation of our shadow experience into the video mode using material from various productions as the basis for an exploration of the possibilities offered by the video medium. The tape was produced mainly by Kate Craig and Hank Bull, with help from the others. Rooted in Pataphysics and Fluxus, our contemporary shadow play also evokes the feeling of communication with ‘other worlds’ that one finds in the ritual magic or Asian theatre. The shadows are suggestive and entice the audience to fill them with meaning; one is drawn into their emptiness. In Asian shadow theatre, characters bring messages from other states of conscious existence, departing when the play is over to some timeless world. The shadow screen in our work represents this plane of contact between ‘here’ and this unspeakable ‘other’. It is here on this plane that we attempt to deconstruct the languages of the past and try to recognise… We began making shadow plays in 1975 as a simple way to produce film. We had already been making radio for some time; shadows added the visual element. So it began in reference to radio and cinema, and even today our productions owe more to film and mass media than they do to traditional shadow theatre. In traditional shadow theatre, for example, the screen is perceived in relation to gravity, with the ground at the bottom and the sky at the top. The action tends to take place in one plane—the foreground—and at the bottom of the screen, unless a character is meant to be ‘flying’. In our works, on the other hand, not only do things approach from the deep distance, but like a film camera, the eye zooms in on certain objects, so that a hand or a finger may fill the entire screen. We also exploit the idea of the palimpsest, by which the viewer looks through layers of image over image, or hears several voices speaking at once.’ (WFVC)

Original Technical Specifications

Format
3/4" umatic
System
NTSC
Condition
Dead

Remastered Technical Specifications

Remastering Date
October 18th, 1997
Format
3/4" SP
System
NTSC
Condition
Excellent

Production Staff

camera - Craig/Bull, technical - D. Kelln

artist biographies

Kate Craig Kate Craig was born in Victoria, British Columbia and lived in Vancouver since the early 1970s, traveling widely throughout the world and spending summers at Storm Bay on the Sechelt Inlet. Since 1975, her work has been presented at venues throughout North America, Europe and Asia. A founding director of the artist-run centre, the Western Front Society, Craig initiated the Western Front’s artist-in-residence program in 1977. She has been instrumental in producing video works for a number of the Front’s visiting artists. Over the past two decades Kate Craig has developed an international reputation for her video and performance based art. Craig’s attention to surface — as seen in her depictions of the human body, the porous face of a rock, the shimmering surface of a body of water or her investigation of the boundary between the contemplative space of the gallery and the structured chaos of the surrounding urban landscape — is central to her art. MORE >