The Power Plant

Artists working in film and video have long engaged questions of narration and structure, truth and fiction. The Plot brings together the work of artists who share approaches to non-linear narrative. They use structural breaks, an economy of means (or its aesthetic) and the employment of film as a stage upon which amateur actors (or their proxies) consider history, human relationships and the space created by the camera. The Plot explores film and video not only as a tract upon which scenes are enacted, broken and re-spatialized, but as a scenario, a deception and a scheme.

The Plot includes Avalanche (2011) by Berlin-based Keren Cytter, whose films often present characters acting out complex and alienated relationships. Her scripted work offers an instability that references direct experience and personal observation, as well as calling upon popular cultural forms (film, television, theatre, and literature). Cytter’s short scenes, repetition and use of a hand-held camera result in abstracted interactions and events. Unstable notions of identity, memory and relationships are also found in the work of Vancouver-based Isabelle Pauwels. Pauwels’ innovative approach to shooting, editing and installation draws attention to authorship and spectatorship as a process. Pauwels’ work, including W.E.S.T.E.R.N. (2010) and Eddie (2005), typically weaves a dense, layered story that implicates the viewer in a negotiation with psychologically complex spaces. Brussels-based collaborators Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys create films and installations, such as Das Loch (2010), that focus on issues of thwarted communication and defensive interiority. Revealing the absurdity of the world we live in, their work questions individual power and proposes a schematic equivalency between individuals and objects.

Together, these works test claims to territory and storytelling. The disruption of narrative in The Plot offers a strategy for considering how we are located in this world.

FALL 2011 PROGRAM GUIDE