NELSON HENRICKS. TIME WILL HAVE PASSED. LE TEMPS AURA PASSÉ.

NELSON HENRICKS.
TIME WILL HAVE PASSED. LE TEMPS AURA PASSÉ.

Image: Nelson Henricks

September 1 – October 16, 2010

Curator: Steve Reinke

NELSON HENRICKS. TIME WILL HAVE PASSED. LE TEMPS AURA PASSÉ. is Henricks’ first mid-career retrospective in Canada. Curator Steve Reinke has selected works produced between 1994 and 2010.

In a practice that spans more than 20 years, Nelson Henricks has produced both single channel video works and video installations, some of which exist in both modes of presentation. When Henricks moved to Montreal from Alberta in 1994 he was already well known for his single channel works. While studying film at Concordia he developed a series of works that were hybrids of film and video and in which French and English were combined. Henricks has explored several problematics through works that can be densely edited, with images, text, sound and voice each having a separate, if precisely and densely interwoven, existence while others deploy editing sparingly, and harken back to the earliest days of video art. They are the quandaries of self-portraiture, the impossible heaviness of writing and speech and literature, the passing of time and physical embodiment, and the self-consciousness of art-making within the discourses of contemporary post-conceptual practices.

Beginning with Satellite (2004), Henricks developed new strategies for video installation, particularly in relation to montage. He began to assemble, or compose, images and poetically condensed texts and phrases with an eye/ear to rhythm and counterpoint. Again and again in Henricks’ work, the impossibility of linguistic communication — of reading and writing — is resolved by a turn away from language. But this turn away from linguistic representation does not resolve itself in the image. Instead, it finds solace in audio, whether as a simple hum or drone, or a percussive banging. Rhythm is primary in Henricks’ work, and it is the rhythm of becoming animal, of turning away from both linguistic and pictorial signification, turning away from consciousness itself to pure, unmediated experience.

The illustrated book accompanying the exhibition includes an essay by Steve Reinke, transcripts of Henricks’ videos and texts written by the artist.

The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery’s contemporary exhibition program is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.