STATE LINES / SAFETY SPACES

2005
3-Channel Video with Sound
State Lines1 & 2 – [TRT – 13:00]
Safety Spaces – [TRT – 60:00]

Leaving one place and moving towards another destination is a familiar one. As we go, we travel elsewhere in our minds, into the past, future and to made up territories in between. In transit our body stays still, but as we look out the window the mind can be transformed into a receptor prime for innumerable imaginings and emotions, some fleeting and distant and some painfully close.

State Lines are two 13 minute videos of a different pipe running along every Montreal subway tunnel wall shot through the window inches away. Over a year of editing, this footage was combined, then sliced to remove every distraction and break, then reconnected to create unbroken lines. In one imagined excursion, a far off horizon mimics moving through a boundless and tranquil prairie landscape and in the other, three blood red pipes tremble and travel unpredictably along a a manic and sketchy map of the subconscious.

Sister video/audio Safety Spaces exposes our vulnerable relationship to fragile and destructible mental architectures. While slowly shifting through a series of seven mysterious subway tunnel spaces over the course of an hour, we are subject to secondary fictions that morph recognizable elements into ethereal and symbolic interiors. These cells seem to be waiting for utility, occupancy or escape, appearing in states of permanent readiness or having just been abandoned. As a complete installation State Lines/Safety becomes about our private connections to ourselves while creating a circuit of exchange between actual and virtual, real and surreal.