Letter on the Present

Montreal, March 11, 2014

Hi Sylvette,

I hope these few words find you in good health. For my part, time races forward, with a plotline that shows no sign of slowing down. To conjure an image, I currently feel like a runner in Parcours, one of Jacynthe Carrier’s video projects exhibited last year at Occurrence. Did you see it? In the grey light of an overcast sky, Carrier filmed a group of people galloping through a sand quarry. The looped sequence is punctuated by breathing spaces. Presence here becomes a flowing current, movement a narrative. Each body is read into the space as a parcel of time, enabling one to gauge its passage. Like the runners, I’m trying to keep up with the group’s pace.

I want to thank you for your generous invitation to contribute to the thirtieth-anniversary issue. I must confess, though, that the idea of carte blanche gave me the jitters, because I know that thought, like history, evolves, and that an entirely different text may “take place” tomorrow. Besides, this issue of the evolutionary seems highly topical in art practices. I’m thinking, among others, of Claire Savoie, whose methodology in Aujourd’hui (date-videos), revolves precisely around this idea. For eight years now, she has been producing one video a day from the visual, audio, and textual materials that each day affords her. From the single thread of her evolving present, she knits together highly poetic sequences, interleaving signs of the times and surrounding motifs.