Vincent Grenier |
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STATEMENT My work is fascinated by contingencies: digressive moments, unbalanced spaces, assymetrical compositions, revealing details, incongruous recordings, and unexpected linkages between form and meaning. My compositions operate as a series of short circuitings Mand rewirings of expectations of unified cinematic space and time. Instead, they create visual movements comprised of both experiential and physical interactions with the image and philosophical queries into the nature of representation. My work plays off the contradictions between my artistic intentions and the physical results of shooting: these divergences generate useful accidents that reveal much more complex ideas about the forms and structures of daily life. The spectator's assumptions and ideologies are made to collide with the cinematographer's mechanics and aesthetics. These conflicting agendas have formed the foundation of my artistic work for over thirty years. They draw attention to how larger cultural and social constructs commingle in a myriad of permutations condensed into the visual. My work eschews the deductive straight lines of arguments, specific judgments and conclusions. Rather, the cinematic, as figured in my body of work, is not located as a fixed and static object, but as an opening for transformative possibilities. Evoking the juxtapositions of the Zen Buddhist koan, my work shakes the patina of the everyday into a humorous and poetic awareness of the present. My works directly confront the ideas of spatiality and temporality as a continuum and unsettle the notion of a universal human experience. Instead, my work moves towards fracturing space and time in order to release how the everyday and the specific hold within them ineffable, untranslatable, visual mappings that can provoke revelations into light, color, form, and composition. -VG BIO ABOUT " Perhaps gentler at first glance but possibly harboring a wicked passive-aggressive streak, the recent video works by Vincent Grenier have consistently been highlights of the Views line-up, and this year was no exception. Grenier has been making witty, elegant experimental films and videos for over 30 years, and his approach has always been defined by its eclecticism. His earlier film works partake of the orthodoxies of experimental film history but refuse to be defined by it. For example, 1978's Interieur Interiors (To AK) is a high-modernist exploration of adjacent geometrical planes, an intimate domestic study, and a collection of wry perceptual miscues organized not unlike a series of blackout sketches. Works from the early 90s such as Out in the Garden and You display a sensitivity to portraiture that allows figure and landscape to merge and separate in a kind of mitosis / meiosis. And most recently Grenier's career has been characterized by a rigorous exploration of digital video and its unique properties. Rather than attempting to duplicate the style of his films by other means, as many film-turned-videomakers have done, he has embraced video's defining traits - relative flatness, a capacity for inner framing and image juxtaposition, and a more tightly controlled capability for superimposition - in order to produce video artworks distinguished by their subtlety and grace, to say nothing of their quirky humor. Where video has been an impediment to others, it has expanded Grenier's creative vocabulary." -- Michael Sicinski, Green Cine Daily, NYFF 07' Views 3 “Vincent Grenier is one of the most rigorous filmmakers of the experimental cinema and one of the most ingenious by the simplicity with which the questions of time and movement are accessed and put into images and sounds. Québécois, Vincent Grenier has lived in the US between Ithaca, NY and Binghamton where he teaches and works. Since his beginnings, he engages with the essential questions of cinema, in particular light and projected shadows, the outline of a given space, duration. The strategies used are always simples: time is at the heart of all of his films, reconstituting each time a ritual; his camera is attentive to the minute movement, the least displacement. Since his very first films, Grenier focuses his interest on the simple gestures of the everyday. To dissolve the abstraction, to draw one’s attention on the minute details which when filmed, become very poetic and reveal the individual behind the mechanical and the routine…” -- Nicole Gingras, La revue de la Cinémathèque, Montréal, Nov. 1991 “Vincent Grenier est l’un des cinéastes les plus rigoureux du cinéma expérimental et l’un des plus ingénieux par la simplicité avec laquelle les questions de temps, de mouvements sont abordées et mises en images et en sons. Québécois, Vincent Grenier vit aux Etats-Unis entre lthaca, New York et Binghamton où il enseigne et travail. Depuis ses débuts, il aborde les questions essentielles au cinéma, à savoir la lumière et les ombres projetées, la définition d'un espace ou d'une forme dans un espace donné, la durée. Les stratégies utilisées sont toujours simples: le temps est au cœur même de tous ses films, reconstituant à chaque fois un rituel ; sa caméra est attentive au moindre mouvement, au moindre déplacement. Depuis ses tout premiers films, Vincent Grenier s'intéresse au mouvements simples du quotidien. Dissoudre l'abstraction, attirer l'attention sur les plus infinis détails qui, lorsque filmés, deviennent très poétiques et révèlent l’individu caché derrière le mécanique et le routinier…” -- Nicole Gingras, La revue de la Cinémathèque, Montréal, Nov. 1991 SHORTER BIO: |
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This page was updated on 8/8/2011 |