FRIDAY FILM AND VIDEO POEM: 'outside my black hole' by Steven McCabe

direct link: outside my black hole by Steven McCabe

outside my black hole (2011) is a visual poetry film juxtaposing urban traffic, ink drawings, and dance. It features the poetry and drawings of Steven McCabe, who is a Canadian visual artist, poet, filmmaker and arts educator.

Steven works with a team to produce his superb film poems. However he manages this collaboration financially, hopefully with grants and backers, the results are nothing short of magnificent. Steven McCabe's film poems are among the best works in this genre being produced in Canada today.

If you would like to explore the film poetry of this multidisciplinary, multi-media Canadian artist and poet and director, check out his channel at YouTube; all his films are also listed at his website.

I would urge you to watch outside my black hole, the filmography is stunning, and then to play it again, but close your eyes and listen.

Steven McCabe is a poet at the height of his powers. This poem interweaves a lifetime of reflection, writing, feeling, and, listening to it, I think, it can't get any richer than this. Or more simple.

It is as if a mythopoeic poet has introduced the simplicity of Zen meditation into his oeuvre. The cascade of images that collide and separate, echo and reverberate, from prehistory through to the fast-paced, urban computer-literate world of hyper-speeds, terrorisms, and space travel is read without drama in an even voice paced to the accompanying visual images and is as mesmerizing as it is breath-taking.

In the film, the drive through the city at night where the lights take on the quality of dream images of inner light opens with translucent circles that feel like we are entering a tunnel. The mysterious dancer in red echoes the kinetic qualities of the poem's images. She is often partially presented, for instance she is dancing with her arms, or as the vivid red petals of a dancer who we don't see all of.

The most stunning aspect visually for me is the way Steven's drawings are presented. If you cut out an image in Photoshop and save it on a transparent background as a .psd file, you can layer that image into Final Cut Pro. Perhaps this was the technique used here.

The drawings appear and disappear like icons in a hallucinated reality, as if they have come directly out of the symbolic unconscious. They are presented exactly as they are, only cut from their pages, and collaged into the film. They appear as tribal totems, inscribed with hermeneutic symbols, the dense black India ink lines layered sometimes into cave-like forms where figures appear.

I've seen some of these images at sites where Steven has posted them and have been awed by their resonances with ancient Greek myth, Indigenous Native American myth and spirituality, the archetypes of Jung's depth psychology, Surrealism, and their impenetrable raw emotive power. The scenes they depict are ones of rupture, hope, connection. Despair, yes, but it transforms into the living moment of now.

Nothing remains as it is in McCabe's work, but is always transforming, as he uncovers layers, exploring the self as an archeology of personal and collective memories.

In outside my black hole, we find a central metaphor of seeing, in our rushed modern lives, caught in a black hole that sucks the promise of our ancestry into its high speed vortex also becomes the black pupil of our eyes, yours and mine, that crucial tunnel that enables us to see the world, and where the world enters us.

Our pupils, black holes, are enlarged at night, to let in more light, and we see this echoed in the nighttime shots, the glazes of hypnotic lights just on the edge of blur. We are immersed in a "poetry noir," as he writes in his notes, and see with our night vision.

And yet, as he quotes Eliot's The Hollow Men,

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars

In an email, Steven wrote, that, besides his Artist's Statement for the show at Propeller (reproduced below), "the video of course also deals with a rather grim assessment of where we are at in this time of history as a species."


outside my black hole was screened at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts (Toronto) in Oct/Nov 2011 as the installation component of Steven McCabe's exhibition A Cathartic Document showing 66 new ink drawings created during 2010-2011.

Video editing & technical support @ A Cathartic Document by Konrad Skręta
Poetry/drawings/narration Steven McCabe
Dance Paula Skimin
Music composed and performed by William Beauvais & Barry Prophet
Director of Photography Eric Gerard
Editing Konrad Skręta
© 2011 Steven McCabe



from Propeller's website:

Steven McCabe

A Cathartic Document

Oct/Nov 2011, at Propeller in Toronto

Multidisciplinary artist Steven McCabe presents 70 pen & ink drawings created during 2010 & 2011 plus video installation based upon his most recent short film.

"During a two-year period I created over 500 drawings with pen & ink as an instinctive response to pivotal personal events. Drawing opens a route to my unconscious where I depict the illusory nature of existence with poetic noir. The internal and external worlds enter and exit one another. The immediacy of ink is a perfect medium for expressing casualties of remembrance. These drawings are not an illustration of ideas but rather manifestations of a moment in reality – a fragment of altered consciousness. Lines mimicking the fluidity of a brushstroke document the workings of psyche and shifting emotional realities. Marks on paper scratch like a machete hacking through the jungle of ego and existentialism to reach the raw edges of myth."

- Steven McCabe

Artist website: www.stevenmccabe.ca

                              

Excerpt from NaNoWriMo, Day 5

She was fleeing from her origin-woman mother, the beginning of her, whose womb she was carried in, given birth from. Tearing at the gusset, a rupture of blood and amniotic fluid, like raw egg white spilled salty and bitter, and she found herself lying in that spreading pool of bitterness. Her mother had never wanted her, her first child, who tied her with a chain stronger than iron to a man she didn’t love.

Steig ate broken eggshell while the white spilled down the white smock of her party dress. She carried a basket of fresh hen eggs and picked them up one by one and hurled them at the womb of the tree where she hid when she escaped. They broke, and broke, and broke, yolks sliding like deep yellow suns and the whites glossy as mucus  over the fallen trunk, in the tomb where she lay, flowers growing from her mouth filled with earth, she, composting into the disintegrating wood.

His eyes, sharp, hawk-like, thin man, spindly legs, and wings, skylark wings grown large, speckled brown, watching.

Steig was coughing in her sleep. Coughing so hard that she woke. She was trying to rub broken egg off her skin when she woke into clean dry sheets, a soft pillow, a fragrant night. She hugged her pillow, tears flowing.

She wished her father were home; everything in the house was so different when he was home.

As she lay in her bed crying she wondered why Granma Blé and Mr. Lipsig had come to tell her such things as made her mother mad and cruel.

She called to her Grandmothers in the night, and her Uncle Zez, for help, but the room remained dark, and silent. If the ghosts were nearby, they did not appear.

The soft pre-dawn light was slowly washing the sky when she drifted off again.

She was rushing away.

Like an ocean sucking itself out because of the cracks in its seabed and never  returning. Or the wind blowing across the land, rushing on until depleted. She fell down the whirlpool circling the drain and the current was too strong to fight.

Then, the colours. She drifted between spheres of bright colours, red, yellow, blue, green, purple. It was peaceful, a moment of the infinite.

She had this dream frequently, like floating with molecules in a vast and enormous darkness that was warm, safe. The colours glowed and each floating sphere seemed a fairy godmother, and to smile on her and bless her, she couldn’t explain the feelings, but they made her calm, and happy.

It was like floating with coloured moons on merry-go-rounds, or swinging on swings, soothing, and swinging ever higher brought a forgetfulness with it, as the colours swirled by, she, flying through the air, back and forth, around and around, a little dizzy, giddy with joy, its freedom.

Alone, but not alone, for the coloured balls were there, glimmering with her.

She came out of this rich and nurturing place of her dreams when she woke. She lay in bed, still feeling a mystical warmth.

We’re all only floating molecules, she thought. Nothing lasts and that gave her relief.

Or was she an old woman now, remembering backwards a life rushing towards her? Steig had a moment of pure confusion, a lonely teen, and yet something else, her future bringing her into being.

She imagined herself old, sometimes, she didn’t know why.

Sometimes she stared in the mirror until she saw wrinkles appear and jowls, a heavier neck, stared until she saw herself grown old in the mirror.

But not today, she got up with the coloured globes ringing in her ears with music of the spheres, the sound of molecules whirling in their vast inner spaces.

(image from my videopoem, the dancer's backskin)

                              

FRIDAY FILM AND VIDEO POEM: 'SHED' by Christina McPhee

This week we grapple with the boundaries of what a film or video poem is. I almost called these articles, Videopoetries. SHED is a videopoetry. It is an art film about light and drawing through time in a shed that is as high as it is long.

Christina McPhee's drawings were filmed over two years and edited as a video montage of screens with varying opacities and speeds. The drawings are like inscriptions. They remind me of free-form pictograms, dream writing, glyphs of an inner symbolism. They are an occult calligraphy, a concrete poem-in-motion, scrawling into being under the artist's brush. The sound in the film is the artist's brush creating the drawings. She writes:

I make very large scale drawings using white rolls of watercolor and drawing papers. The drawings are usually created in a horizontal orientation working from right to left, like writing without backtracking or extensive editing. When not executed horizontally, the drawings are also created in a vertical orientation and worked from top to bottom like a scroll. The markings are calligraphic and topologic and do not represent content. They consider intensities and nodes. I consider depth of field from point to point moving from the implications of the last move into a new territory. Each drawing gesture generates the next.

This is an automatic writing. A poetry. I consider SHED a genre-crossing piece that brings together a poetry of drawing and video editing. It is a multiplicity, a place of vectors. The nodes and intensities are democratic, without hierarchy; they are nomads drawn into being by the brush of India and acrylic ink and red paint encrusted on the paper by the artist.

Christina calls her drawings Teorema, after the Pasolini film of the same name which she speaks about in the video below SHED. Of her studio space, which reminded me of a stark meditation cabin, she writes:

A shed is a barracks, a shelter and it is hermeneutic (pertaining to its own secrets). The shed is a place of elemental becoming and the drawings develop the space of the shed just as the shed develops the space of the drawings. Mutually they create a performative condition for video installation as drawing. The accumulation of layered montage in multiple takes gives rise to a series of videos.... the video creates drawing as architectural event.

direct link: Christina McPhee's, SHED / cinema clip / 2011

At her website, we find further clarification:

During two year’s time, SHED CUBED traces the heliotropic movement of drawings across diurnal passages of light and darkness in an austere interior of concrete floors and white walls. SHED CUBED is ‘shedding’ drawings. The drawings accumulate, re-materialize, and melt away in the space of the shed….

SHED CUBED reflects on the materiality of video as a drawing medium and architectural body.

SHED regards the effect of transverse light, as the sunlight moves through the space from early morning onwards… The video footage captures the slow changes of the light and the rapid changes of the drawing. In post production, the video format becomes a long strip, rather than the typical rectangle– a sequencing and serial effect. The footage is compressed up to a limit of 900 percent. The shed is hermeneutic (pertaining to its own secrets) but the transverse light inside the shed explodes the intimacy of such a secret space, brings it into the light. Effectively the light exposes the drawings as a writing process that iterates line after line in accumulations, refrains, recollections and recursions. Following the drawings, the video montage sheds time in layers, in a profusion of moments…the installation recapitulates the shed.

You can view the full series of SHED's "drawings as writing process" at her website, where she calls them a teorema of glyphs, nomads, aplophorids, chromogenics, lightjets. They are also reminiscent of marine life (she speaks of shrimp being thrown on the deck of a boat by the sea during a marine ecology project) and insects, of the underpinnings of larger living ecosystems.

I hope you enjoy my choice for this week's featured videopoem, and as you watch SHED, and the articulation of its processes and some of the inspirations and aims that Christina offers at a presentation below, you are inspired.


direct link: Christina McPhee: Shed


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