Video Art

                Garrett Long spoke at the University of Lethbridge’s Art Now Series on November seventeenth. Garrett is a video artist who has been exhibited around the world, most recently having his work shown in England. First attending the University of Toronto he found himself  “falling into art by accident” He attributes this to the institutions strong interdisciplinary practice offered during the course of his studies. He admits “My intent was never to become the artist in the family… but was constantly surrounded by technology growing up.” His early work was first inspired by taking a sculpture class and attempting to combine video and sculpture together harmoniously. These successes lead him to exhibit around various Toronto locations and he began to focus on video’s place within the art market. Specifically how something so disruptive and infinitely reproducible could be manifested into an art object. Early works consisted of a video flip book that focused on this idea of translation between the medium and the viewer. Garrett soon found himself focused on this places where the translation would fail and break down, rather than the success of making a good translation.

These experiments soon lead him to begin to work with ventricular images. Taking various clips and images of video experiences he was able to interact with the viewer forcing them to become part of the piece. As Garrett explains “I particularly enjoy the ventricular experience as audio and everything important in these frames takes place outside frame. It’s recognizable but you still don’t seem to know what’s going on.” He admits that he is constantly struggling in these works “Am I giving enough information, is the physical moment enough to create the moment?” Continuing his idea of turning video into a physical object he sought out a printer that would translate and render video frames into three-dimensional plaster models.  He used a very graphic and disturbing video of hunters attempting to kill a lion only to have the lion turn on the hunter’s before being shoot. I found this clip very graphic and self-descriptive, and even when shown the very obscure patterns within the object that were produced; it was still hard to disassociate my original feelings from the video clip. Garrett enjoys how the video moment is encapsulated in a sort of artifact and how that translation is interrupted by turning video into a physical object. Further interested in video that on the exterior may seem disturbing but to Garrett hold a sense of beauty and visual interested he focused on the challenger disaster. Documenting a moment in time is not new in the world of art. Rather Garrett presents the video images using ventricular images allowing the viewer to control their own experience within the work.  I find this process of using ventricular images very interesting because it seems with his work the images cannot exist without the viewers as a key element. 

This constant interaction with the viewer allows the work to be experienced and controlled  in a unique way by each person that cannot be duplicated of reproduced, such as video inherently can be. I find it interesting how Garrett removes certain aspects of video such as audio and allows the viewer to inject their own interpretations within the piece. I would recommend exploring the work of Garrett Long for anybody who is interested in video and the many ways it can be presented within the gallery space and society. His work challenges our perceptions and takes something that for a long time only existed in space and time and transcends it into objects that seem to bridge the gap of translation.