Still Life with Easter Everywhere

Easter Everywhere is a feature-length video/digital film by Vancouver artist Jeremy Todd, which debuted at Emily Carr University in 2008, screened at the Helen Pitt Gallery in the same year, and is currently distributed by Video Out. It overloads a 68-minute timeframe with fragments of plots, historical and futuristic epithets, and dense visual layering. A cable access TV show called Vancouver Rock Talk frames an investigation of the 1960s band the 13th Floor Elevators, while a blindfolded Lady Justice (played by the formidable Margaret Dragu) alludes to an apocalyptic future that unfurls in the aftermath of the 2010 Olympic Games. Pan shots move across rubble and layers of cranes at an Olympic construction site. A Man (played by Eric Metcalfe) sits in front of a camera surrounded by a microphone and candles, recording lonely ramblings. His image is intercut, incised and overwritten with fragments of films noirs: skulls, screaming damsels, ­severed heads. Readings from an unpublished novel by ex-Elevators’ drummer Danny Thomas, describing utopian dreams of pre-’68 psychedelia, recur throughout the work. The soundtrack feels like flipping through radio ­channels, cycling between the Elevators’ album Easter Everywhere and original music that is light, lonely, whimsical and contemplative.

I like to think of Easter Everywhere as a still life — one that is, ironically, stretched into the decidedly un-still mediums of video and music. Sill life with film noir, Justice, Rock Talk and Easter Everywhere: a movement-toward the (unimaginably) still, a teeming stilling, a memento mori for utopian yearnings. Emanating past and future tenses, the film speaks of before-the-revolution and after-the-apocalypse, bracketing out an indeterminate plane of enquiry: an unknowable surface-like present, a palimpsestic, ­endless cohabitation of plots and visuals which verges on their co-erasure. The narrative’s braided threads don’t add up to a clear structure but, rather, exist as a pile, a heap of possible constellations. Images are layered to the point where they verge on pure texture. This heaping structure enacts decay on the tissue samples of plots, characters, quotes, and images, ­inviting allegorical engagement with the work and its characters (as well as the “silent character” of the filmmaker, the one who has layered).