Nelson Henricks

"Our apartment was one hundred years old, and it was haunted. Friends suggested that we paint a black spot on the ceiling to get rid of the ghost. She wasn't a bad ghost, she was just an old hooker. She kept turning the front hall light on and off, and opening doors for her johns, who came at all hours of the night. She loved sex and she loved parties, so we were forced to have sex and parties all the time to appease her. Other ghosts were also there: immigrants who spoke neither English nor French. They had come from far away, and longed to return to their homelands. Sometimes they sang sad songs. Shimmer started as their story. My grandmother's story, my parents' story and mine got mixed up with theirs along the way." - Nelson Henricks

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.

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.

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.

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.

"This two-part video is a newcomer’s portrait of Montréal. I spent my first winter in Québec in a cold, dark, first floor apartment. I sat in the kitchen beside the electric heater, drinking coffee while watching the electric meter, wondering how I would pay my bills. At night, I looked at the illuminated “Q” on the Hydro Québec building and imagined how much it cost to keep it lit. In the second section, a man looks for meaning in the tile patterns of the Champ-de-Mars metro station. I took his search to an end more absurd than anything I could hope to enact. The moral of these two tales is: “Don’t lose you sense of humour”. It’s from this cliché that the video derives its title." - Nelson Henricks

Handy Man examines the window as a site of voyeurism and surveillance. With his Hi-8 camera, Henricks documents two workers in his interior courtyard. The camerawork has a secretive and furtive feel, treating the male body as an erotic object. This footage forms the basis of a video which attempts to implicate the viewer in processes of exhibitionism and image fetishization. Handy Man is part of a trilogy of works exploring one of the principle metaphors of video: the window.

About synesthesia. The artist explores the links between sound, colors and letters.

Over the course of one year, Henricks periodically shot footage from front window of his third floor apartment. This material became the basis of Window, a video about knowing. How do we come to know a place or a person? Our knowledge comes from more than one unique experience. It is the sum of repetition and variations. Window shows how a whole can be more than merely the sum of the parts. It is the first in a series of works that explores one of the principle metaphors of video: the window.

Crush is the story of a man who wants to turn into an animal. He employs a variety of techniques to transform himself. He cuts off parts of his body. He exercises. He wants to return to the water to speed up evolution a little. Has he gone mad, or is he just tired of being human? As the narrator descends into his private obsessions, we begin to perceive the distorted outlines of reason that guide his journey. The trajectory he takes allows us to reflect upon the correlations between the body and identity, our culture’s obsession with the body beautiful and what it means to be human.

Using a Super8 camera, Henricks employed time-lapse photography to document the interior and exterior of his apartment. Inspired by the work of Virginia Woolf, this video uses writing as a metaphor to examine temporality and impermanence. Time Passes is part a series of works that explores one of the principle metaphors of video: the window.

In the video Satellite, Nelson Henricks combines found footage and techno beats to question western society's ongoing obsession with science, technology and the future. Juxtaposing images derived from old educational films with absurd, aphoristic slogans, Henricks offers up a witty, entertaining and provocative commentary of our need to make sense of everything, at any cost.

Conspiracy of Lies speaks of alienation and minorities, consumer culture, urban isolation, and the fine balance between mental order and chaos. The tape begins with a voice recounting the story of the discovery of a series of diary entries and lists written by an anonymous author. Through the use of twelve different narrators, an attempt is made to destabilize pre-existing assumptions concerning the voice of the author.

On the 2012 student manifestations in Quebec

I am near-sighted. When I see a potentially beautiful boy at a distance, I perceive him as perfectly beautiful. Gradually, as he approaches, he begins to accumulate defects which detract from his overall beauty; sometimes to the point where he ceases to be attractive at all.