Fantastic coverage to kick off a fantastic celebration

Wow! We're pretty excited to receive such detailed and enthusiastic coverage about our 25th Anniversary from Walrus Magazine. Thanks to Mike Landry for a great interview, which has turned into a great blog post!

25 Years of Video Pool
Mike Landry, walrusmagazine.com/blogs, April 16th, 2008

To celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, Winnipeg’s Video Pool media art centre made a poster detailing its history. But the twenty-five year history of an artist-run centre is as harried as they come. Rather than a straight timeline, Video Pool’s history looks more like a brainstorming session gone wrong. In the aptly titled The Incomplete, Contested, Anecdotal, Unedited, Messy, Nostalgic, Faulty, Controversial History of Video Pool So Far…,bubbles of people, places, moments in time, and minor scandals are connected with AV cables.

But Video Pool isn’t just celebrating their milestone with a poster. For the next month Video Pool takes Winnipeg by storm with six commissioned works from the centre at spaces around town.

The works are from two big names in Winnipeg: Sigrid Dahle, and Grant Guy. Dahle has been living and working as a risk-taking independent curator in Winnipeg about as long as Video Pool has been around. Guy, who comes from a background in theatre, has been involved with the centre from the very beginning.

Video Pool’s initial idea was to have the curators explore media art’s past, present, and future. But both Dahle and Guy took that theme in their own direction, and commissioned artists at different stages in their career who all have ties to Video Pool. Having a diverse representation is always important to Video Pool, says programming coordinator Milena Placentile.

“It’s really about keeping the dialogue going between different generations and making sure everyone has access to what they need at all points in their career.”

Dahle commissioned Steven Loft, Richard Dyck, and Lori Weidenhammer and Peter Courtemanche to explore “the implications of an artwork in which vulnerability, failure, requirements for regular maintenance and a reliance on (unstable) shared networks are foregrounded?” Loft tackles the question with a video installation tackling the racism, violence, and filth of an average Manitoba video lottery terminal-cursed bar. Weidenhammer and Courtemanche combine performance and sound art with a dress laden with speakers. But it’s Dyck who takes the cake for the most mind-altering reaction to Dahle’s question, “How might [a] piece’s ‘malfunctioning’ serve to create a time and space for quiet contemplation and memory.” He does this with a computer program simulating a camera moving through a 3D rendering of a photograph from 1947 according to mathematical algorithms that result in a new video each time. Yowzah.

Guy combined his theatrical background with the performance aspects of media art. He did this by asking Daniel Barrow, Victoria Prince, and Sharon Alward to address the concept of light as material or metaphor. Barrow does this a do-it-yourself version of his famed overhead projection performance. Alward brings a healthy dose of insanity with her not-quite-in-performance piece featuring martial arts and one-on-one tea ceremonies. And Prince used her commission as an opportunity to branch out from her single-channel work, presenting a video-based sculptural installation that includes water and salt, among other things.

For those familiar with Video Pool from the beginning, it should be no surprise they used this celebration to commission new work. That’s exactly why Video Pool was founded in the first place. Well, that and to pool video resources.

“That it is something designed with a celebration in mind and also designed specifically for our programming as opposed to just supporting production in principle makes it quite original for what we normally undertake,” says Placentile.

Because Video Pool doesn’t have its own programming space, it has partnered with several Winnipeg galleries and theatres to exhibit the new works. With such a tight-knit community though it wasn’t a problem getting collaborators for Video Pool’s celebration. For Placentile, who moved to Winnipeg from Toronto recently, it’s exactly this atmosphere that attracted her.

“Whether it’s something as simple as loaning equipment and then even sharing space, it can just happen in a flash. Everyone realizes how important it is to do that to be here and be successful”

For a little film collective that blossomed into a non-profit artist-run centre, Video Pool certainly has grown up. Rightly, this celebration marks its most ambitious year yet. Increased planning has led to more generous grants, which in turn has led to more programming. There’s even talk of trying to tour the six new works. With their artists becoming more and more recognized, Video Pool is starting to receive replies to their emails from around the world.

In Winnipeg though, people just appreciate that Video Pool exists. With new and expensive technologies like high-definition media, the centre is the only place where many artists can dream of accessing these high-end materials.

“It’s hard for people to enter, and they have ideas of what they want to make and do, and being part of a larger community makes it all possible,” says Placentile. “This is what drew me to Winnipeg, and Video Pool really embodies it.

Festivities kicked off April 12 with Daniel Barrow’s show at Plug In ICA. Head to videopool.org for a complete schedule.