SAW Video presents world premiere of PUBLIC DOMAIN a national media art commissioning project

May 26, 2010 · Filed Under Blog, Festivals and Events

OTTAWA – April 2010 – The premiere screening of SAW Video’s national media art commissioning project, Public Domain, will take place Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at the Library and Archives Canada auditorium, 395 Wellington St., at 7pm. This ambitious commissioning project has brought seven artists from across Canada to Ottawa to create contemporary video works drawn from the traces of the past.

Launched in June 2009, Public Domain is the first commissioning project of this scope undertaken by SAW Video and the first of its kind in Canada.

With the support of a grant from the Canada Council Media Arts Commissioning program, SAW Video commissioned seven accomplished media artists working in Canada to create new video works using public domain films and videos footage in the Film/Video/Sound Collection of the Library and Archives Canada. The result is Public Domain, a programme of six new videos which, after its premiere in Ottawa on June 23rd, will tour across North America and Europe in 2011.

Public Domain presents a unique and valuable opportunity to contribute to the ongoing discourse around copyrighting images. According to SAW Video director Penny McCann, “Works that are in the public domain are, theoretically, free from copyright restrictions, however the process for obtaining permission for these ‘public’ works can be expensive and bewildering, The purpose of Public Domain was to offer media artists the opportunity and the resources to crack open the treasure chest of our national archives collection while at the same engaging in questions of what images in our collective past get archived and which do not.”

The range of media artists chosen for this project promise a wide variety of approaches and techniques which make use of archival documents. For Mireille Bourgeois, SAW Video’s programmer and coordinator of Public Domain, this project looks both back and forward: “These artists are our contemporary authors, generating a multiplicity of perspectives on our history and culture while writing a new history with unique voices.”

The seven mid-career and established artists represent a broad cross-section of media artists working in Canada. Each brings critical ideas to bear on the time and explores the very nature of the image for its visual, narrative, mnemonic and evocative potential. While some of the artists highlight the fragility and disappearance of images, others focus on its renaissance by recontextualising it.

Sara Angelucci (Toronto) links the fragility and physical evanescence of the image with the volatility of memory and identity.

Maureen Bradley (Victoria) employs a feminist and political approach in the form of essays which join the force of documentary images with a kind of personal docu-fiction.

Gennaro de Pasquale (Montreal) collects images and sounds from multiple sources, which he then assembles in video collages according to their formal and semantic properties.

Steve Reinke (Chicago/Toronto), already internationally known for the use of archival documents in his video essays, transgresses the nature of the archival images he employs by giving them a new context and a new meaning using a voice-over narrative.

The artistic duo of Ryan Stec and Véronique Couillard (Ottawa)are particularly interested in the graphic qualities of analogue images, which they manipulate digitally using a process of live retouching and mixing that imparts a new rhythm and a new nature to the images.

Suzan Vachon (Montreal) gleans from archival collections images with oneiric and evocative possibilities which she incorporates into her lyrical essays.

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SARAH COOK WRITING RESIDENCY

SAW Video invited internationally renowned Canadian curator Sarah Cook to undertake research in Ottawa from April 26 to May 22, 2010 to provide a broader perspective on the theory of the “public domain” and its uses by artists in media arts disciplines. Cook’s writing will be included in a SAW Video publication that will accompany Public Domain as it is screened across North America and Europe throughout 2011. This provides contextual information about the commissioning project and contribute to the greater discourse on video art.

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For more on Public Domain, visit www.sawvideo.com/publicdomain.

Tags: Public Domain, Saw Video