Poets with a Video Camera – Tom Konyves and a milestone exhibition
A HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to Tom Konyves!!! for organising this long-awaited curation. This is an achievement of a lifetime and needs much recognition, particularly as it is a long-running event (September 17th 2022–January 2nd 2023). Titled Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980–2020 and taking place at the Surrey Art Gallery (SAG) in Vancouver, there are 25 artists taking part representing different stages in the forty-year period.
Hours of Darkness, Janet Lees, 2014
Artists to be screened are: Jim Andrews with Adeena Karasick, Paul Bogaert, Eric Cassar, Brandon Downing, Antonello Faretta, John Giorno, Kurt Heintz with Patricia Smith, Nobuo Kubota, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Valerie LeBlanc, Janet Lees, Machine Libertine, Azucena Losana, Matt Mullins, Marc Neys,bp nichol, Reverend Pedro Pietri, Arturs Punte, Caroline Reid, Javier Robledo, Peter Rose, Hubert Sielecki with Gerhard Ruhm, W. Mark Sutherland, Sarah Tremlett, and Eku Wand.
This is truly a milestone in the genre, and there will also be a very interesting symposium on the subject (in which I am very honoured to say I am the key speaker) on the 5th November, 2022 entitled: ‘New Art Emerging: Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry’. Other speakers will be Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas discussing collaborations (CAN), Annie Frazier Henry, (CAN), Fiona Lam ‘Animation and Poetry’ (CAN), Javier Robledo of VideoBardo ‘festivals’, and Matt Mullins. Heather Haley will be discussing festivals, and Kurt Heintz ‘Reminiscences’. Adeena Karasick will be performing ‘Checking In’ live. It looks like an exciting and inspiring day.
My video poem some everybodies is from 2009 and asks questions about place as embodied site, tourism, and passing by. It centres on a corner near a tourist hotspot in historic Bath, England (where incidentally a small accident occurs). Footage was gathered over a year, from a fixed camera, and both the sound and the images have been slowed down to emphasise movement. Conversations have become text-on-screen disconnected from the images and creating a communal poem of the site itself. Wherever a tourist has paused to take a picture, the film has been frozen for a few seconds, and the screen has a graphic coloration to emulate old postcards (which have also been made from selected stills, to accompany the film).
More updates on this coming up in the next month or so but check out SAG if you need more details in the meantime. A not-to-be-missed event.
