A Landscape of Here and There

1998, 10:00

 

A kinetic spilt-screen train trip through the central Canadian landscape and the English countryside/urban corridor into London, England. Colour and B&W Super-8 is juxtaposed into a ‘meta-landscape’.  Colour suggests the present, with B&W as a return to the past after a lengthy absence.  Rhythms, patterns, and objects clash, play off each other, blend and overlap, pulling the viewer to and fro.  Resolution into a united field is moved toward, as the distinct halves come to resemble one another, but never fully achieved.  Like a metaphor for the way in which technology, and in particular the camera, shapes perception, the openings between boxcars of passing trains distend the landscape, whose role in forming identity is also raised.  A journey offering an opportunity for meditation on suspension – visual, psychological - between places, states - between origin and destination.