Nik Forrest

An experimental portrait of a place, Scotland. You are looking for something. What you find is something else. "Stravaig / Errance" (Gaelic for wandering) is techno tourism of a personal nature. Forrest visits a Scotland that only she may show us. The artist is an informed tourist with a curious eye. The viewer is lead, but there is no sense that the artist holds to a definitive way to see/record. Travelogues are referenced in "Stravaig," but their form is never embraced. This is not tourism, but memory and sense. Forrest looks beyond the architecture and must see sights of the place(s) to unearth an ethereal essence of space/time.

The 10 new and retooled silent video works presented here are each director's response to a silent and nocturnal viewing situation. They are short, eclectic and remarkably diverse, representing a glimpse of contemporary Canadian video art.

Human beings define themselves in opposition to both nature and technology. Emission attempts to confound any simplistic analysis of these worn-out dualities. The video comprises eight episodes that are grouped into three acts. The first addresses technology and language. The second implies a breakdown of language and a movement towards being animal. The third envisions a confrontation with our animal nature.

In defiance of the background noise of homophobia, a series of dreamlike images evoke the interplay between private and public spaces, and the continual disintegration and reconfiguration of queer identity within (and on the periphery of) dominant culture. The soundtrack combines a litany of voices from a radio talk-show which fade in and out of background electronic noise, processed underwater sound effects, and a poetic text. The images represent a movement from the interior space of dreams through intimate private domestic scenes, out into the public urban spaces of subway stations and street intersections, and finally to the city skyline as seen from across the surface of a body of water.

SHIFT explores the loss associated with movement from one place to another and the loss associated with an intimate experience of death. Death deconstructs. Things fall apart including the sense of a unified self. Ideas of continuity and stability are eroded. Images shot in Scotland, Saskatchewan and Montreal are combined with studio footage to create an associative narrative about an experience for which ordinary language is inadequate.

A reflection on gender, delving into childhood memory, gender fluctuation and a love of late 70s rock stars.