Bringing Toronto to Venice and Back
Film-based artist Mark Lewis represents Canada at the 2009 Venice Biennale
by Tatiana Mellema

Mark Lewis does not make your typical Hollywood films, but he does make films about them. An internationally renowned artist whose works in film-based media have garnered him critical praise, Lewis will be representing Canada in this year’s Venice Biennale, the oldest and most prestigious international venue for exhibiting contemporary art. The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at Hart House, under the direction of Barbara Fischer, is responsible for organizing Lewis’ exhibition in Italy and is also the first Canadian institution to commission a new work by the artist. For those who cannot make it to Venice, the project will also be exhibited at the JMB Gallery this upcoming fall at the same time as a retrospective exhibition of Lewis’ work at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Currently based in London, England, Lewis grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, and has shown in a number of solo and group exhibitions worldwide, having become known for his visually evocative videos. Lewis draws on the overlooked aspects of cinematic illusion and everyday life, providing a reflection on the history of image making and urbanity. The exhibition, Cold Morning, to be showcased in the Venice Biennale’s Canadian Pavilion will feature new film work by the artist that explores the cinematic special effect of rear projection. This new work will expand Lewis’ repertoire of films that reveal the social construction behind our real and imagined spaces, proposing an alternative model for looking at our world.

In the late nineties Lewis began producing single four- to five-minute 35mm reel films transferred to DVD that employed a single shot deliberately anchored in a specific outdoor location. In these videos he emphasized the use of simple camera techniques such as zoom, dolly pan or 360-degree rotation, demonstrating the technical means behind conventional cinema. Lewis describes this approach as “part cinema”, the artist breaking down the grammar of popular film and isolating its techniques to compose an elemental film work. Consider, for example, North Circular (2000), in which Lewis takes the camera from a wide still shot of an abandoned office block and uses a dolly to slowly track the camera forward into a building where a group of boys skateboard, ending the shot on a small toy top that spins and falls by a window sill. The camera’s unusually extended movement gives the viewer the time to consider the disintegrated building and the filmmaking process while driving the video’s development. Lewis’ films are short, silent, carefully paced and dynamically framed, uncovering aspects of their own construction through duration and movement, all the while emphasizing overlooked urban spaces as their central subject matter.

Cold Morning will showcase several short films using rear projection, a filmic technique where performances in studio are combined with exotic pre-filmed locations or documentary footage projected behind foreground action. This technique provides the potential to include two or more distinct places and durations within a given film image. With the advance of digital technologies that more seamlessly montage location and action, the use of rear projection is quickly disappearing. However, Lewis—fascinated with the history of back projection and its perceptual push and pull—will examine its pictorial effects for Venice. The Canadian Pavilion exhibition will also be accompanied by two screenings of Lewis’ documentary Backstory (2009), which profiles the Hansards of Hansard Enterprises. This family-run production company provided rear projection for over 70 years to some of Hollywood’s most important films, but is now facing the reality of a shrinking studio. Creating an homage to rear projection, Lewis will reflect on our current critical moment in contemporary filmmaking in which the modern cinematic image has become an index of the past.

In 2006, Lewis first began experimenting with rear projection through a series of videos that emphasized the technique’s temporal and spatial discontinuities. The work Rear Projection (Molly Parker) (2006) features the actress from the popular television shows Six Feet Under and Deadwood wearing a deadpan expression in front of a pre-filmed projection of a Canadian landscape with a rundown building. Using two simultaneous zooms and dollies the video draws the viewer into the actress and landscape, the background slowly beginning to drop as Parker is focused in on, while halfway through the autumn background quickly dissolves to winter. According to Lewis the technology of rear projection inefficiently brings together two separately filmed experiences; viewers experience two distinct visual regimes that are unwoven. Therefore what is designed to make the transition of scenes appear seamless in fact makes this transition palpable. In Rear Projection (Molly Parker) the wide frame of a distinct Canadian landscape and the minimum shot of Parker superimposed among the firs and maples effectively split the pictorial space and elicit a perceptual oscillation. Lewis exploits this spatial dislocation, uncovering the construction behind the image, while providing a tribute to this historical convention of representation in which audiences were asked to just suspend their belief (and gladly did).

Overlooked urban spaces are the all-telling location shots for Lewis, the artist employing his stripped cinematic techniques in order to simultaneously unveil the mundane. For Cold Morning Lewis' films will include footage of some of Toronto’s most unspectacular locations including The Toronto-Dominion Centre, Nathan Phillips Square and the intersection of Bay Street and Queen Street. Having lived in Toronto for some years and familiar with its streets, Lewis has chosen generic spots that capture the transitory nature of urban life. In his earlier work Rush Hour (2005) the artist filmed the haunting shadows of passersby projected on the sidewalk, capturing the collective rhythm of the everyday crowd on their way to and from work. By re-framing human activities and their spaces Lewis considers the social choreography behind the everyday. The utopian ideals informing the architecture of the modern city, as well as the constructed nature of daily activities, are bracketed for our reconsideration. While simultaneously deconstructing urban life and cinematic representation Lewis reveals these landscapes as inseparable from one another. Cinematic codes that organize image production have also played an important role in fostering expectations and shaping actions fundamental to daily living. Situating his films between the real and imagined he reveals our spaces found in film and the everyday as historically and socially produced rather than natural.

The premiere of Lewis’ project in Venice will provide an exciting addition to his body of work that plays on the relationship between cinematic representation and the real city. Although it cannot be screened prior to the Biennale’s opening in June, we can anticipate Cold Morning will be a continued exploration by Lewis into the relationship between place, time and representation. A tribute to rear projection, Lewis will consider the history of cinematic image making, all the while featuring our rarely considered downtown spaces. Pulling at the seams of our representations, Lewis asks audiences to rethink our cultural codes and role as social players at this critical moment in cinematic history. While presenting the mundane as a staged set through a perceptual push and pull Lewis points out our grand narratives and the potential agency behind knowing that we are always playing our own leading roles.

Justina M. Barnicke Gallery | Upcoming exhibitions

May 28, 2009 – August 23, 2009 | Noise Ghost
Works by Toronto artist Shary Boyle and Cape Dorset artist Shuvinai Ashoona

September 8, 2009 – October 25, 2009 | Cold Morning
North American premiere of Mark Lewis' Cold Morning after the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia