The Project Description: The restaurant at the Château Lacombe rotates. I want to invite a group of fellow artists and writers to dinner there, and put a video (VHS) camera on the lens. As the camera records for 60 minutes, the microphone will record the gossip and every day conversation of the participants. I would then want this video to play on a non-stop loop throughout the exhibitions run.

The Project’s Conceptual Underpinnings.

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning real
Dusty Springfield, Windmills of My Mind.

My grandmother died, and left me this camera, and I am about to leave Edmonton, back to Toronto. The camera is of a dying medium, difficult to get film for. The Lacombe has a kind of spectacled modernism of wealth and privilege that has now faded into something worn and a little sad. The restaurant rotates slowly; the only way that we can be sure that change has occurred is a slightly different kind of scenery. The circle of my life, with the cycle grandmothers life, with the leaving of a city and the death of a medium, creates a difficult web, combining it with a place which makes no progress, and is now home to high school proms, middle class wedding receptions, and other dress up events, while cycling on something that constantly moves, but never goes anywhere, has an intense psycho-geographic mark.

The work will take an hour to make. It is done in real time. It will be done as a way of remembering, of making real an event that was chosen as spectacle. Think of it as a pop trash recreation of Max Olphus infamous waltz scene in La Ronde (you know the one, it was stolen by Fosse in Cabaret.) The scene, and I hope this work, will be simultaneously ironic of sentiment, and heartbreaking in encapsulation of desire and loss. Also like Kiki and Herb, who manage to be strange, political, camp, and dismissive of camp, in their version of the Dusty Springfield I quote above. The work will have an edge of sentiment, but by only showing the world passing by, and not visually engaging with the participants, also a certain voyeuristic refusal of the camera’s mechanical gaze.

This becomes a camp 2.0, then, a desire to document everything, but to avoid the cameras, to circle about with pleasure, but to use that pleasure as a symbol of death, but only obliquely. The real cannot be returned to, it cannot be discussed directly, like a fish that becomes more slippery, the more one tries to catch it. What is real here—the meal, the documentation, the desire, the loss? What is hyper real, the bibliography of references in the second paragraph, the dark metaphors into the first, the stretching of an hour event into 2? What is surreal, making the private into public, making everything into theater?

This project then, wants to mess around, with Reel, like the dance, or Reel like what you put film on, or Reel like what you use to Catch fish, with Real like what has happened, with real, like what is factually accurate, with Real, like what can be ontologically proven.