LESLIE PETERS
Images is proud to host this survey – the first
of its kind – devoted to the work of Leslie Peters.
A productive, ubiquitous presence on Toronto’s
video art scene, Peters has already created a significant
body of work – adventurous, subtle, carefully
made – and promises remarkable things to come.
Canadian video artist Leslie Peters, who makes both
single-channel videos and video installations, has been
quietly building a subtle and impressive body of work
since she appeared on the scene in the late 90s. Peters
is one of the first of a new generation of video artists
to create works that demand to be seen projected, rather
than on a monitor – notably in her 400 series
(1998-99) – while her installations make careful
use of the sculptural qualities of the video image in
space. In a video art context where the image often
serves as a foil for linguistic, social and theoretical
concerns, Peters practices video as a truly visual art,
investing images of the urban environment and landscape
with metaphoric power. (This may be why, despite the
fact that her work has been screened at venues from
Barcelona to Buenos Aires, from Poland to Australia,
there is vanishingly little writing on her work!)
Trained at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Peters
released her early videos (e.g. 1997’s memory
series) at around the same time that fellow anti-art
artists such as Jubal Brown and Tasman Richardson were
gaining notoriety with rapid-fire editing and shock
imagery culled from mass media, but her work only briefly
shared similarities with theirs. This generation of
video artists shares a deep understanding of electronic
media, their conventions, and how to subvert their normal
use. Peters showed a fondness for analog technology
and its inherent tendency towards decay, and the results
can be seen in works such as theory (1997,
a collaboration with Peter Gmehling), the 400 series,
and Analog vs. Digital (2000), a “video
duel” with Tasman Richardson.
It was with the 400 series of short videos,
in 1999, that Peters really began to explore the possibilities
of cityscape and landscape, which have been recurrent
subjects. These videos offer the most literal representation
of her aesthetic of the “between,” since
they are all works made on the road, driving from point
a to point b. At the same time, they oscillate between
representation and abstraction, estrangement and intimate
familiarity (conveyed often through the country songs
playing in the car while the video is being shot). The
idea of this kind of between state, neither one nor
the other, manifests itself in the videos in any number
of ways: a landscape shot at daybreak in seed
(2002); a camera’s forward and backward zooms
overlaid in basin (2002); or the inextricable
layering of two scenes in the sublime divine
(2003). interference (2003), a recent collaboration
with Dara Gellman, marks a move towards work on a more
ambitious scale. This unsettling look at the menace
and solitude of suburbia reworks television crime-scene
footage to evoke a distinct foreboding from our side
of the yellow tape. |
