Video Art of Sylvia Safdie PDF
Preview Video Art of Sylvia Safdie
the video art of sylvia safdie Eric Lewis The Video Art of Sylvia Safdie McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013 ISBN 978-0-7735-4169-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-8900-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-8901-8 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2013 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Lewis, Eric, 1961- The video art of Sylvia Safdie / Eric Lewis. Includes videography. ISBN 978-0-7735-4169-6 (cloth).-- ISBN 978-0-7735-8900-1 (ePDF).— ISBN 978-0-7735-8901-8 (ePUB). 1. Safdie, Sylvia, 1942- --Criticism and interpretation. 2. Video art--Québec (Province)--Montréal. I. Safdie, Sylvia, 1942- II. Title. III. Title: Sylvia Safdie. N6549.S23L49 2013 709.2 C2013-900420-3 Contents Introduction 3 Eric Lewis Sylvia Safdie’s Bodies: Portrait of a Hand at Work Eleanor V. Stubley 13 Sounding Breath – Breathing Sound: The Video Art of Sylvia Safdie 37 Eric Lewis Videography 115 the video art of sylvia safdie Introduction Eric Lewis The Video Art of Sylvia Safdie explores the most recent medium that Safdie’s video art, begun in 2001, can be seen as a natural this prolific artist has chosen to explore and situates her video work extension of her work in painting, drawing, and sculpture. The meta- within her broader artistic career. Safdie’s works in painting, drawing, phors and metamorphoses suggested by her previous work in these and sculpture are meditations on the convergence of place, time, and static media (such as a focus on cycles of natural change, and using memory. The themes of temporality and transformation run deeply natural elements as placeholders for human bodies) are played out throughout her work, especially in relation to the human form and in many of her videos, which become a moving canvas on which to its connections and correspondences with the natural world. Indeed, explore ideas of space and time, stasis and movement, embodiment much of her art invokes the human body either directly or abstractly. and nature. Her use of a fixed camera framing a moving subject – Bodies, or parts of bodies, are presented in a state of transformation whether it is a bird hovering in flight, water running over stones, or and flux, emerging from or disappearing into natural backgrounds of dust moving in a column of light – captures ordinary movements earth, water, or stone. Even absent bodies often make their presence and processes within nature that acquire heightened meaning and felt. Her works frequently employ raw materials from the earth – soil, significance from the artist’s unwavering attention. The transi- stone, metal, wood, and oil – used with little or no alteration, implying tion to video has also allowed Safdie to experiment with sound in that an imprint is left on the natural world by every act of creation. her work and, crucially, with the interaction between sound and Sylvia Safdie at work Photograph: Patrick Andrew Boivin Previous spread: Amzrou Synagogue Interiors, Series I, Interior 4 [48.4], video still (detail)
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