This filmography is still in progress. Vincent Grenier made several films not typically included in his official filmography (especially pre-1974) about which information is in the process of being gathered.
An * prior to the title indicates that this information has been taken from Grenier’s official filmography, but a copy of the film has not been checked yet to confirm information.
All UNitalicized texts are written by Vincent Grenier unless otherwise attributed.
LA BROSSE, LA GUENILLE, ET LE DEAU D’EAU
(The Brush, the Rag, and the Water Bucket)
16mm
more info coming
JAUNE (1971 or 1972)
(Yellow)
16mm, 16m
more info coming
THE FLIGHTS OF ALEXANDER MAXIMILIAN TUMONT SENAT OHM OLIVER (1971 or 1972)
16mm, 15m
Title is probably partly incorrect, as it appears in multiple forms in different print references.
more info coming
BUMPS (1972 or 1973)
16mm, 14m
more info coming
THE EAR (1973?)
16mm, color, sound, 14m
more info coming
HONEY MOON LANE (1972)
16mm, bw, sound, 26m
Stars Ann Knutson and Norman Stiegelmeyer.
Inspired by dreams and nightmares, Honey Moon Lane unfolds with a series of absurdist entanglements in the heterosexual love life of a man and his loved one. For better or for worst, this film is as engaged in the unraveling of amorous film clichés and fantasies than it is in the spirited creation of a somewhat schizophrenic and hysterical emotional space.
Premiered Feb 15, 1973 Canyon Cinema SFAI, 800 Chestnut St., San Francisco
Prize winner, ($100.) at the 1973 Bellevue Film Festival, Oregon also screened at the 1973 Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, the 1973 Foothill Film Festival, Calif, the Festival du Nouveau Cinema en 16 mm, Montréal, Canada.
A 45 minutes version with added contribution of Lee Meyer toured California in one of the Midnight Movies programs curated by Mike Getz. These programs were screened at commercial movie theaters in many cities across California in the early seventies.
SHUT UP BARBIE! (1973)
16mm, color, sound, 12.5m
The film is a reaction to the obsession a seven year old girl has with her many Barbie Dolls. The world of Barbie is pushed to its innocuous and tragic conclusions. Ann Knutson plays the role of the mother. Shut Up Barbie was pixilated in Tiburon, Ca.
Collection of University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
WINDOW WIND CHIMES: PART 1 (1974)
16mm, color, sound, 27m
Grenier digitized this film in 2018 and subsequently made only chapters 1 and 2 available as a screenable excerpt version running 5.5 minutes.
With the assistance of Ann Knutson.
“…but the best film, Window Wind Chimes, by Vincent Grenier, (a Canadian filmmaker who had been living in San Francisco and now makes his home in New York), explores in semi-documentary manner the interrelationship between Vincent Grenier and his wife Ann Knutson in the environment of their San Francisco apartment. Conversations between them consist of fragments of arguments, apologies, affections and distillations of the personal rituals that take place between man and wife.
“The film begins outside the apartment in a laundromat with a tour-de-force performance by George Kuchar rattling off at the mouth about wind chimes, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller; a character obsessed by something or other trying to make contact with the surrounding world and never succeeding. The scene changes to the apartment where Ann and Vincent play taunting games with each other, teetering on the edge of cruelty, games of power-playing and unresolved husband/wife tensions. In most instances he is the instigator, and she remains on the defensive.
“In one scene, and ironic game is played on the viewer while the conversations continue off screen. What appears to be a vast expanse of snow, in close up is revealed to be only a white pie topping. The camera does not so much follow the action of what is taking place, but rather concentrates on the environment of furniture, walls, windows, floor tiles, etc. ‘Window Wind Chimes’ combines the best elements of straight documentary with a very personal and poetic vision.” (Bob Cowan, Take One, Feb. 1976)
“…Grenier made what was perhaps the most innovative film produced in the Bay Areas, Window Wind Chimes. This film sent the personal narrative quietly into other dimensions, sort of a restaged “home movie” in which indications of his more recent work surfaced.” (Mike Reynolds, Berkeley Barb)
CATCH (1975)
16mm, bw & color, silent 24fps, 5m
“Catch is a fragmented observation on hidden reflective surfaces, the corner of a dormant television screen, a window…” (Mike Reynolds, Berkeley Barb)
LIGHT SHAFT (1975)
16mm, bw, silent 24fps, 8m
Interestingly, Grenier shot this film in color, on 7242 Ektachrome EF stock, but then had it printed on b/w reversal print stock, and only released the film in b/w. Although it’s possible that he had a specific reason for shooting on color but printing on b/w from the beginning, it’s also possible (and perhaps more likely) that he initially planned to make a color film and decided early on that it should instead be b/w.
This is probably my first film to really deal with what became my obsessive attachment with visual ambiguities. The theater is a black place after all where the ritualistic ray of light’s main function is to reveal other places. This idea of “showing” the reproduction of another place has become so expected that it seems only inevitable to tamper with it. Here this tampering process of recognition results in ambiguities between notions of solidity and space, the inner and outer limits of the screen, directions, movements and others which mingle into unforeseen expectations, while a small wedged screen of light probes as the impossible window into the dark.
Light Shaft diagonally crosses the screen with a wedged light formation, usually on the diagonal. Its variations are rendered through arrangements of the tripod while panning the camera. Limiting the viewer’s attention to a smaller screen, a point in space, allows for a certain confusion as to whether the rest of the (dark) screen blends itself into the surrounding blackness or is just a window into it.
This is more apparent when the “wedged light” goes out of the frame. It can be felt as if crossing the room; and it reappears at the opposite end of the frame. Sometimes it just makes a turn and comes back. The form and size of the light are influenced by movements of other objects, thereby shifting the impression of materiality between itself and its edges.
SHADE (1975)
16mm, color, silent 24fps, 16m
Grenier digitized this film in 2018 and revised it to a shorter version running 9 minutes.
“Shade is a near exhaustion of the possibilities between camera (aperture, focus) and nature (sun, wind). It is a beautiful study-poem on the undying presence that renders the world perceptually. In this minimal area, the variations are pursued with quiet doggedness, each frame revealing the secret of the next.” (Mike Reynolds, Berkeley Barb)
WHILE REVOLVED (1976)
16mm, color, silent 18fps, 9m
Some editorial/version information is still TBD on this film. Grenier had Bill Brand create an optical internegative ca.2003 for some reason, possibly to effect some structural or aesthetic change to the film – Bill is looking into this. Also, in 2004, all extant prints were checked by Grenier and something removed from the same place in all of them (extant prints all have a splice in a particular black section in the film).
A sound version (with sound by Etienne Grenier) was created (as a digital-only work) in 2022.
An elusive film that plays in a series of movements, on the fascination that can be had from watching the turbulent magnified grain. A slippery background flows, rises and sinks honing the focusing abilities of shadows, and unexpectedly producing an other magnified grain…
Made with a grant from the Canada Council.
While Revolved: Pools of light and shadow displace each other as the camera describes an arc or spiral on a section of wall or ceiling. Periodically the motion stops, replaced by selective focus on a grainy object, creating a sense of wave motion in and out of the screen. This film is concerned with the projected, not just light or the emulsion or the illusion or the projector or the camera, but all of them. The surface of the film, the grain, is remembered when a similar but illusionistic surface appears (just as magnified), crossing the frame. Other times the grain is left to itself. There are the idiosyncratic focusing qualities of shadows acting as diaphragms inside the image. The elusive background confounds itself with the foreground. The notions of appearances and disappearances transform themselves in notions of time.
WORLD IN FOCUS (1976)
16mm, color, silent 24fps, 16m
Made with a grant from the Canada Council.
In World in Focus, the screen becomes the two dimensional support of an amazingly versatile three-dimensional object (the Atlas) which contains in turn two-dimensional pictures of other three-dimensional objects. The physicality of the book offers an area no less real that its language. (i.e. text, pictures etc) which is itself presenting a dislocated image “of the world.” To look at the objectness of the book is in fact to look at the real thing, something which is contained in what it portends to describe. The film inventories and builds both on number of camera/book affinities and the ramifications of the resulting deconstruction of the book’s “language.”
“An homage to the primitive cinema of the flip-book, and the ultimate armchair travelogue, World in Focus was a deserved prize winner at this year’s (1978) Ann Arbor Film Festival and is a beautiful idea, beautifully realized.” (Jim Hoberman, The Village Voice)
X (1976)
16mm, bw, silent 18fps, 9m
Made with a grant from the Canada Council: filmed with the help of Ann Knutson.
In X, a black line can be perceived as delineation or as a shape in itself. It can also be a slit through which one can feel the background; or it sometimes becomes undifferentiated from one of the areas it delineates when, because of light changes, the areas become black as well. A shape which may seem to cross the frame horizontally can just as well suddenly appear to do so vertically or even go backward and forward in the film space. The rectangle of the screen itself metamorphoses into a trapezoid, temporarily stretching the black mass surrounding it.
“The insinuation of camera movements and the familiarity of the same forms recurring in black and then luminous white shapes, makes X an intriguing visual play on positive/negative space. Scale, depth and angle of view are indecipherable. Is it the object or the cameras which moves across the frame? This Rubic’s cube for seeing simultaneously demonstrates the illusionism of cinematic space and the camera’s ability to isolate and transform. Grenier’s use of silence in X is perfectly à propos to its concerns. (Raphael Bendahan, Vanguard, Summer 1985)
INTERIEUR INTERIORS (TO AK) (1978)
16mm, bw, silent 24fps, 15m
With special assistance of Ann Knutson.
Changes of spatial relationships, scales, locations, and materials are intimated with recognizable clues which nevertheless do not always eliminate the former understanding of the images. These and other levels of ambiguity are instilled, which shake the photographic image’s authority as a principle of reality by confronting it with its illusory nature. We are back with magic, made possible with black and white film, shadows and lights, the limitations of the screen and the depth of field. So as when film grains, dots in deep space, disintegrate the solidity and enclosureness of a wall, the intentions of the film and the transforming events accumulate at a very intimate level of the viewer, that is at the level of the mechanism of his understanding.
“Grenier’s great skill is that by means of shifts of focus, by subtly altering light level and shadow, by moving the camera axis, by playing upon grain, contrast and surface texture, he can provoke constant mystery as to what exactly we’ve just seen, are seeing, will see next.” (Simon Field, Time Out, May, 1980)
“Interieur Interiors (To A.K.) creates a cinematic space that remains separate from representation, severed from the pro-filmic but nevertheless presenting an illusion of space. It is a film that hovers between conceiving the interrupted projection beam as an image… and conceiving it as a non-image, a mere illumination of the surface on which it falls. The gap between these extremes is posed by Grenier’s film as the raw data of cinema, the interval in which structural aspects of the medium’s depiction of space are revealed.” (Grahame Weinbren and Christine Noll Brinkmann, Millennium Film Journal, 1981)
“One striking aspect of Interieur Interiors (To A.K.) is that each specification of a spatial reading has a short perceptual life. If it is not renewed and reinforced the viewer soon loses it and is confronted again by an indeterminate space, which can be changed at will. Grenier relies on two kind of factors to achieve these temporary specifications: motion, which is itself unambiguous if in a direction parallel to the screen and which automatically defines a recession; and the insertion of a recognizable element. When the two factors appear together, even for a moment, the cinematic space is transformed into one of representation.” (Grahame Weinbren and Christine Noll Brinkmann, Millennium Film Journal, 1981)
“…And although we may repeatedly be laced back through the spatial ambiguities and the similarities of light reflection (a kind of sensuous and tendentious voyage), what Grenier leaves us with is finally not the realization that lines and shapes become objects, nor that objects deliquesce into abstraction, but that both object and abstraction can be accessible at the same moment. That is what is so demanding and so unrelenting.” (Martha Haslanger, Downtown Revue, Winter 1980)
Award:Second Prize winner, San Francisco Art Institute Film Festival, 1979. Purchased by: Collections of the Universities of Wisconsin at Milwaukee – University of Colorado at Boulder – the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto – the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Donnell Library, NYC.
MEND (1979)
16mm, bw, silent 24fps, 5m
Is it happening in the screening room or on the screen; in a snowstorm or inside; what isn’t surrounding and what is? From filming Ann sewing, on a grey winter day.
MEG (1980)
16mm, color, silent 24fps, 6m (5:46)
This film would later comprise the first section of the complete D’Après Meg.
*ARCHITECTURE (1981)
16mm, bw, silent 24fps, 8m
CLOSER OUTSIDE (1981)
16mm, color, silent 24fps, 9.5m
This film was initially entitled Against the Light, but does not seem to have been released under that title.
With special assistance of Ann Knutson.
The precisions and idiosyncrasies of movement associated with domestic activities are closely stared at, or as it sometimes happens, watched carefully through the peripheral vision. This while rhyming, is done in alternance, thus creating sudden rushes in the mind while spaces collapse. Also, light burns wedges in this film, recalling…
Ce qui bouge n’est pas nécessairement ce qu’on regarde. L’opacité de l’espace environant contient en latence des découvertes qui interpellent le regard. La trajectoire de celui-ci à travers cet espace représente une forme de mouvement qui se mesure avec ceux qui passent devant la caméra. La structure du film utilise des juxtapositions constantes de premier plans et d’arrière plans qui périodiquement se métamorphosent en leur opposé. Le flou qu’un petit angle permet d’obtenir peut aussi bien être celui de l’avant ou de l’arrière plan que de l’espace plat de l’écran. L’utilisation des couleurs chaudes et froides qui s’associent respectivement aux lumières artificielles et naturelles, vient compliquer davantage ces relations d’espaces. Pendant ce temps, il se passe des choses, peut être des mouvements habituels ou autres comme ceux qu’on pourait s’imaginer à l’intèrieur d’une pièce où des gens vivent. On en voit le plus souvent les résidus dont les rythmes à la fois idiosyncratiques et inéluctables s’interposent à ceux du regard.
“Closer Outside, the highlight of the program is an amazing film. Grenier, whose background includes painting, has a powerful command over color as an emotional hook, giving the film an anticipation and suspensefulness not generally associated with minimalist films. Just as the viewer is drawn into the sensuous presence of a setting, suddenly colors shift, objects seem dislocated in space, identities change, all creating an almost visceral shock of surprise to the viewer…” (George Howell, Buffalo Evening News)
D’APRÈS MEG (1982)
16mm, color, sound, 16.5m
“Grenier’s D’Apres Meg, departs from the routine of structuralist cinema. Through the repetition and fragmentation of physical gesture, wild sound and snatches of conversation, Grenier elicits narrative possibilities from otherwise disparate elements. Repetition is, after all a form of insistence. In D’Apres Meg small hand gestures are microscopically observed in their everyday context, a garden conversation, a construction site, a gallery setting. By taking our common peripheral vision of events seriously, Grenier produces an evocative enigma. From these images and bits of conversations, which are equally mundane, a new kind of disinterested seeing can be engaged. One that does not deflect meaning as invite it through repetition.” (Raphael Bendahan, Vanguard, 1985)
TREMORS (1984)
16mm, color, sound, 13m
Tall buildings and cars are filmed through the Kinemacolor process, variable color filters and a water lens. Sturdiness jousts with fragility, past with present, alienation with tenderness, abrasiveness with sensuality, red with green. (The Kinemacolor process was used in 19l5 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black and white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized, red and green filters.)
TIME’S WAKE (ONCE REMOVED) (1987)
16mm, bw & color, silent 24fps, 14m
Grenier historically listed this film’s year as “1977/87” in his filmography, as the footage dates back some years before he completed the film in 1987, although the earliest material actually in the film’s original spans 1978-1981. He also refers to the 1987 film being a revision of an “earlier version”, and any further information on this earlier version will be added as I discover it.
Described as “a collection of ‘windows’ on a personal past” Time’s Wake (Once Removed) incorporates material from an earlier version. On the earlier version: made from material I collected through the years when I went back to visit my parents at L’Ile d’Orleans, Quebec. It includes both home movie and other types of footage. In this film, the camera “I,” in extension with home movie reality, is a living participating entity. The film represents an endearing but removed artifact, a strange contradiction between liveliness and frozenness.
A collection of ‘windows’ on a personal past, Time’s Wake (Once Removed) is made from home movie and other types of footage I collected through the years when I went back to visit my parents at l’Ile d’Orléans, Québec. The film expands the theme of the double image, by linking fragmentation, motion and stillness with memory.
“A beautiful film that frames the landscape with multiple devices (camera, window, trees) but is free of the traditional Canadian fear of the land and the obsessive need to enclose it.” (Cathy Jonasson, New Experiments, Canada House, London)
I.D. (1988)
16mm, bw, sound, 58.5m
Part I, Prologue: 10 min, Part II (Joanne): 10 min, Part III (Milton): 17 min, Part IV (Steve and Nadra): 19 min. I.D. was filmed in Binghamton, N.Y. The main participants are, in order of appearance: Gayle Gorman, Joanne Thorne, Milton Kessler, Steve Grietzer, David Gresalfi, and Larry Klein. Dedicated to Lorie Blanding. Part 1 was produced in part by SUNY at Binghampton Cinema Department. Part II, III and IV with the help of the Canada Council, over a number of years.
A driving interest in this film has been the raw material of conflicts between the persona and the individual qualities of a person. Also an interest in superimposition partly as a disruptive device equally metaphorical of conflicts between interior and exterior spaces. The use of synch-sound “reality” with an eye on tension between off-screen and screen spaces. Lip-synch is used mostly in counterpoint.
The procedure for the film involved interviewing people with relatively uninhibited and expressive personalities. I asked them about events which had made them feel estranged and alienated from things or people around them. Most talked about were traumatic events, although it is not necessarily what I was seeking. From these conversations, physical contexts were sought for their interactive possibilities. The participants were exposed to situations which were partly uncomfortable. The camera does not simply prod but is also an active participant; not so much to render meaningful but to appreciate and transpose.
“Vincent Grenier is best known for his elegant black and white films that manipulate spatial illusion through light and abstract shape. In I.D. he has taken on human subjects and their verbal discourse, again dealing with fleeting and shifting identity. In the four parts of I.D. the filmmaker asks each subject to talk about an event that “make them feel estranged from things or people around them”. The identity of the speakers is often obscured by their strange position in the frame, and by superimpositions (of the same scene at a different moment) which break up and recompose the image into veils of light, shadow, and areas of detail and texture. The narrations, too are layered. They splinter the discourse and metaphorically pose the film’s question about identity: is there a persona which remains coherent under all conditions? (Joanna Kiernan, Parabola Film Distribution Project brochure for Current Avant Garde Filma 4)
“…The black and white I.D. utilizes superimpositions of image and sound to capture a series of monologues and dialogues by acquaintances of Grenier in Binghamton, New York; the camera and microphone capture the people and their surroundings elliptically yet far from objectively, functioning largely as participants in the encounters. Original and often beautiful, these films(I.D. & Time’s Wake) encourage us to reconsider phenomenological experience as well as memory in fresh and interesting ways.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Critic’s Choice, READER, Chicago, Friday April 7 1989)
Selected by a jury for promotion by Parabola Art Foundation’s Film Distribution Project in Program 4, 1989; Selection Committee was composed of Kathy Geritz, Mark McElhatten, Sandy Maliga, Joanna Kiernan and Bill Brand.
Purchased by: SUNY Binghamton for library collection.
YOU (1990)
16mm, color, sound, 15m
Grenier digitized this film in 2018 and revised it to a shorter version running 12 minutes.
I had been looking for someone’s unnerving encounter, that conversation that one just couldn’t get out of their head, the kind of event that leaves one still debating out loud while walking in the streets or doing one’s tidies in the bathroom. After interviewing a few people, I found Lisa Black who obliged with one of her own and became the film’s main character. A situation with many angles; the telling, the filming, the final projection event…You is an imaginary fictionalized you in a whimsical space. It is the still live residue of the broken relationship Lisa is here confronting. A parallel actor, the film is in the business of reinterpreting. As a result the film is closer to a psychic space, an ironic place where distance is also intimate and a measure of insight. Lisa Black is a member of theater 00bleck in Chicago.
Award: Director’s Choice, 1990 Black Maria Film and Video Festival. Screening: Society for Cinema Studies Conference, 1991, UCLA.
OUT IN THE GARDEN (1991)
16mm, color, sound, 14.5m
This film is sometimes given the subtitle Talking Portraits, Part 2.
A film about the dynamic of assumptions as seen through the struggle of a gay man who has recently been told that he is HIV positive and who, in his own way, tries to come to terms with the news. The film eschews the usual talking head and focuses on the peculiar occasion for examining anew as brought on by disconnectedness. In the process,questions of identity, one’s sense of reality, the day to day and social tyrannies end up implicating the viewer intimately as well.
Set in and around the house and garden of a middle-aged upstate New York academic, Grenier’s intimate experimental documentary portrait explores, in an innovative form, the thoughts and feelings of one man dealing with AIDS. (CFMDC)
Awards & screenings: Michael Moore Award for Best Documentary, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1992; Best Experimental Documentary, 1992, 16th Atlanta Film/ & Video Festival; Black Maria Film & Video Festival, 1992, cash award; 23rd Sinking Creek Film Celebration, 1992, cash award.
*DISPLAY (1992)
video (Hi-8), color, sound, 16m
FEET (1994)
video (Hi-8), bw, sound, 28m
This film is sometimes given the subtitle Talking Portraits, Part 3.
A video portrait of an intimate friend of the artist – Susan Weisser – and her relationships with her 13-year-old son, Billy, and 17-year-old daughter, Amanda. The author asked them to reconstruct their daily rituals. The results were enactments, accounts, confidences and arguments that freely crisscross each other within the dynamic created by the presence of the video artist and his “unobtrusive” Hi-8 camera. Surprising events ensue within evocative framings of sounds and images, and the enchanted constructions from the fanciful revelations of the everyday.
Un portrait vidéo personnel d’une amie intime, Susan Weisser, et de ses rapports avec son fils Billy (13 ans) et sa fille Amanda (17 ans). L’auteur leur a demandé de reconstituer leurs activités quotidiennes. Il en résulte des confidences, des confrontations et des discussions vives, qui s’entrecroisent librement à l’intérieur de la dynamique créée par la présence de l’auteur et sa caméra Hi-8, témoin discret mais tout de même présent. Des dénouements surprenants s’ensuivent à l’intérieur d’encadrements évocatifs de sons et d’images et d’improvisations imaginatrices de révélations du quotidien.
SURFACE TENSION #2 (1995)
16mm, color, sound, 6m (original version)
Grenier revised this film in 2005 to a shorter version running 3.5 minutes.
The music in this film consists of two pieces:
-“If You Can’t Eat You” by Nicholas Pap, performed by Miriam Van Steenhoven
-“Mandala” by Peter Hamel
For some reason, in his digital master for the shorter version of the film, Grenier identified the Hamel music as being a Time Curve Prelude by William Duckworth, but this is not the case – the music is the same as in the original film.
This film was shot in color but using the Kinemacolor process, a process which was used in 1915 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black and white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized red and green filters.
Ce film fut filmé avec de la pellicule couleur, mais utilisa le procédé Kinemacolor. Le procédé, inventé en 1915 permettait de projeter des images en couleurs à partir de films tournés en noir et blanc. Il nécessitait une projection synchronisée au moyen de filtres rouges et verts. Surface Tension a été tourné dans le «lower Manhanttan» au début des années 80.
*ROLAND POULIN SCULPTURE (1996)
video (S-VHS), color, sound, 15:20
*MIRACLE GROW (1998)
video/16mm (shot on Mini-DV), color, sound, 12.5m
With Etienne Z. Grenier & Mary Zebell.
Miracle Grow is a personal piece with elements of a home movie. Originally shot in Mini DV, edited and transferred to film without leaving the digital realm, the film is an inventory of a growing baby as he struggles to gain mastery of his limbs. As the father, the filmmaker attempts to insert himself within this well-worn and taboo subject and redefine it. As in his other works, the images are composed and structured to lead us within other realms of thought.
BRENDAN’S CRACKER (1999)
video/16mm (shot on Mini-DV & Hi-8), color, sound, 8.5m
With Betty Ostrov, Susan Weisser and Brendan Murphy. Shot in Mini DV & Hi 8 and edited on a digital desktop workstation.
This film is a collage of distant worlds, lost and not yet learned; memories and functions as playful instincts. An Alzheimer-afflicted woman’s distant reactions are intercut with the mischievious antics of a four-year-old looking into, scratching and feeding the screen.
*AURORA STREET (2000)
video (Mini-DV), color, sound, 3m
CAPTURÉ… (2000)
video/16mm, color, sound, 5m (5:01)
Shot and finished on standard definition video, then filmed to 16mm for distribution.
With appearance by Etienne Grenier. Soundtrack design by Vincent Grenier. Excerpt from “Strings” by Marius Constant.
In Capturé the camera seem to be looking at the evidence, intent on unraveling a puzzling mystery… An introspective and personal piece that is concerned with mirrors, presence/lack thereof, humor of the ordinary, being contained, defined, homing. Images of a small quirky Montréal hotel room are juxtaposed with others taken in Ithaca, NY, where Grenier presently lives.
COLOR STUDY (2000)
video (Mini-DV), color, sound (stereo), 4.5m
A humorous, digitally induced meditation on colors, motion and space from a few frames of road side fall panorama in upstate NY.
“It is interesting to think about Color Study in relation to the purely cinematic-photochemical nature of a work like Kurt Kren’s Asyl with its multiplicity of delicate composite imagery and overlapping seasons that create a feeling of all time being simultaneous. In Asyl, solar light cohabitates with the film – the emulsion receives singes and burns that inscribe the image and are reconstituted in projection as muted radiance. In Color Study, a cat’s eye like clairvoyancy of splattered color, the precise mimicry of natural color combined with unnatural color fields, creates and breaks illusion. Color manufactures a kind of implied time lapse where it does not technically exist. A spatial jigsaw, combining the autumnal and the verdant. The invented light and color of the digital process creating an acid wash.” (Mark McElhatten)
“The opening image of Vincent Grenier’s Color Study (2000) shows a hillside of trees in autumn, covered in green, red, auburn and brown leaves. Changes in colour values slowly occur as patches of pixels begin to shimmer, replicating the seasonal transformation of the trees’ leaves. The modulation in hue, which is almost imperceptible at first, becomes more dramatic as the piece develops. Washes of colour from the video spectrum sit over the hillside and dissolve into each other, taking the landscape image into abstract territories. Towards the end of the piece the original colours of the trees return, but one is left with a very different perception of ‘natural’ colour.” (Simon Payne, Notes, Tate Modern’s Colour Field Film & Video Program/Contrasting Surfaces, Nov 22, 2008)
WINTER COLLECTION (2000)
video (Hi-8 edited on Mini-DV), color, sound, 4m
This video was originally shot in Hi 8 on a winter day in 1992, the last day Ithacans could have their dry garbage and cast-offs hauled away for free by the city of Ithaca. Huge piles of debris and broken household items had accumulated on curbsides throughout the city, awaiting disposal. Then it snowed. These piles, the broken kinks of the comfort machine of consumerism, offer voyeuristic opportunities for incongruous art happenings. The camera collaborates with an old Toyota car, which doubles as a dolly, to photograph these found art installations offered in front yards. These random, quotidian piles transform with monster-like auras and new-found permanence. The Toyota also supplies the musique concrete soundtrack.
MATERIAL INCIDENTS (2001)
video (Mini-DV), color, sound, 5m
Material Incidents brings a layered look at the secrets of light’s rituals and its loose associations with matter, temperature and the senses. Our eyes, our brain’s primary sensors, ultimate arbiters of our sense of reality, well being and even of security, are closely implicated in this shadowy drama where notions of solidity, joust with fluidity and the ephemeral.
HERE (2002)
video (Mini-DV), color, sound (stereo), 7m
A boy’s phantasmagoric world of heroes is captured in layers of light and hues. This video, humorously and poetically juggles ideas about make believe and representation of the everyday.
“Here plays as some form of synthetic/organic haiku or renga (Japanese linked poetry) linking semblance to semblance working with the primal power and suggestiveness of transient colors.. A shift in hue argues for motion or cessation –stop and go. Migrant juices of color change aspect –blood, fire, rain, red leaves living and dead.Green plastic soldiers float lifelessly in autumnal pools of septic yellow. Simple magic. Simple prophesy. Child’s play augurs global events and as in Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre a patch of backyard here becomes a primeval forest of decaying moss a beachhead and the abandoned frontline, a field of fire as a tableaux mort.” (Mark McElhatten, Turino Film Festival Screening Notes)
TABULA RASA (1993-2004)
16mm/HD video, color, sound, 7.5m
Camera, production and editing by Vincent Grenier. Additional camera by Bill Rowley. Sound recording by Joel Schlemowitz.
Filmed in a South Bronx high-school, Tabula Rasa attempts through sound image juxtapositions, digital manipulation and layering to deal at once with the propensity to mislead and eloquence of the recorded image. The ambiguous qualities of appearances, so assiduously cultivated by institutions, the motivations found in the clues that tells the history of objects, colors, textures, architecture and ultimately, psychological states of mind are but some of the players in this poetic and cultural happening.
All the material for this digital video was initially shot on 16mm film, in June of 1993. thanks to a grant from the Canada Council. We hear the voices of mediation counselor Victor Hall and student John Cruz. The filming would not have been possible without the help of an extraordinary teacher Dan Sheehan.
“Verbal descriptions of fictional comic book characters are interwoven with elegant abstracted shots of a South Bronx high school’s walls and corridors (which according to the filmmaker is an ‘…attempt to sort through and take to task the enormity of that institution… to engage in a real discourse…with the clues that tell the history of objects, colors, texture, architecture and ultimately, psychological states of mind that are but some of the players …’) A possible undercover study on institutional formatting of minds not yet affected by experiences.” (Black Maria Film Festival)
“Revisiting footage he shot more than ten years ago in an American high school, Vincent Grenier combines deftly manipulated and layered images with oblique commentaries delivered by students and instructors. The socializing process of education is made visible in the architecture, surfaces, and colours of the school, ‘in the ambiguous quality of appearances so assiduously cultivated by institutions.'” (Images Festival)
Tabula Rasa was “one of the absolute stand out of Views From The Avant Garde (NY Film Festival) 04’.” Also on 2004 Top Ten Films List — Michael Sicinski, Online Journal “The Academic Hack”
NORTH SOUTHERNLY (2005)
video (Mini-DV), color, sound (stereo), 5.5m
Sound: Edited fragments from John Cage’s Credo in US performed by Markus Hauke & Mainz Percussion Ensemble.
Changes of directions, in the wind, the edges, the shapes, a joyous and mesmerizing intrigue. Perhaps an other way to put it is to describe this piece as a humorous digital cine take on the long cultural history of the lessons left by the great Chinese painters of the 13th century for whom shapes and edges where often all one and the same.
On North Southernly’s use of sound :
One of my interest in choosing and editing the sound for this video was in its use as cultural reference, one that would bring different (hopefully humorous) readings of the unfolding images. The painterly and exalted nature of the video images, while unique, is part of the same cultural history as the musical quotations used in John Cage’s piece. He also felt moved to challenge the tonal musical world of his predecessors by treating their music as rhythmic material for his percussive project.
Statement:
In many of my recent digital video works, I have experimented with color, sound and composition as expressions of cultural assumptions, in addition to, being expressions of phenomenological, visual or psychological events. Through sound image juxtapositions, digital manipulation and layering, this work attempts to deal at once with the propensity to mislead and eloquence of the recorded image. Images and sounds were chosen, or perhaps found themselves because they showed potential for this kind of interaction. Paying close attention to a re-mix of the artifacts, camera recordings make, I am particularly interested in re-contextualizing or at least rescue received ideas in the way formal structures and meanings have traditionally been created.
“For an example of an artist exploring the aesthetic possibilities of video to their fullest, one need look no further than Vincent Grenier and his recent work. He’s not just “working in video. Vincent Grenier is a true video artist, and North Southernly is a subtle, complex study in textures and gradations of layered video imagery.” (Michael Sicinski, Online Journal, The Academic Hack)
THIS, AND THIS (2006)
video (Mini-DV), color, sound (stereo), 10.5m
This, and This, is digital immediacy splendor where images of nature cannot be merely innocent. Ideas about the natural and the mechanical are being toyed with, in varying degrees of wetness, scale, compressed states and expectations.
“…Vincent Grenier, … is an artist whose shift to digital filmmaking has consistently been characterized by a rigorous investigation of the specific aesthetics and formal parameters of his adopted medium. This, and This is no exception. Thematically, Grenier’s piece is a conversation with nature in both its raw and culturally mediated forms – for example, the rushing waters from Ithaca Falls juxtaposed with the spray of a rain puddle traversed by a steel belted radial. The piece is in many ways a meditation on the power of the straight cut, as opposed to the fades and image-alternations so common in recent video work. As the video progresses, Grenier implies that non-mediation doesn’t exist. But on an even more basic level, This, and This pits vertical against horizontal movement, as well as pushing digital video to the limits of its comfort zones, as swirling forms begin to pixilate or produce visual feedback. Grenier’s medium is indeed the lion’s share of his message.” (Michael Sicinski)
“Filmmaker Vincent Grenier directed this short subject in which a pastoral scene is full of both beauty and menace. This, and This was shot near the shore of a lake in the midst of a wooded area. As we watch the lapping of the water against the shore and the unspoiled surroundings, the scene gradually develops an undertow that’s troubling despite the peaceful scenery. This, and This was screened in competition at the 2007 Rotterdam International Film Festival.” (Mark Deming, All Movie Guide – Fandango Blog)
ARMOIRE in two parts (2007-2009)
video (Mini-DV & XDCAM-EX), color, sound, 5.5m
Armoire: “The aviary in the mirror, in-flight hide-and-seek, mischief on the wing.” (Mark McElhatten, Rotterdam Film Festival)
Coda added in 2009: The bird escapes.
It was all started by a Red Robin who one day in the spring, obsessively went after his double in the large mirror at the end of our garden. Just having fun with the surrounding consequences regarding storage, openings, motion and nature among others.
“The secret might have been the unassuming wonder of Vincent Grenier’s Armoire, a film in which a small bird expands the edges of the frame by hopping and fluttering about. As the frame responds to his light, unpredictable movements, it is at times rushing sideways or holding still, shrinking and stretched in every imaginable permutation. And yet the frame doesn’t always manage to capture or contain the bird, who in the end darts out of sight. It is as if he is the true filmmaker, directing the scene and, with his own star exit, deciding when to cut.” (Genevieve Yue, Senses of Cinema)
“Perhaps gentler at first glance but possibly harboring a wicked passive-aggressive streak, the recent video works by Vincent Grenier have consistently been highlights of the Views line-up, and this year was no exception. Grenier has been making witty, elegant experimental films and videos for over 30 years, and his approach has always been defined by its eclecticism. His earlier film works partake of the orthodoxies of experimental film history but refuse to be defined by it. …
“Reminiscent of Scott Stark’s video SLOW from 2001, Grenier’s piece is less complicated, more straightforward, resulting not in ambiguous space but in a confounding metonymy of images, splashing us with a puddle then driving on. This year’s Grenier video, Armoire, is one of his briefest (three minutes), and its humor is so deadpan I actually didn’t immediately recognize it as such – a true ‘way homer.’ In it, Grenier has ‘trapped’ a bird in a reflection on the water and essentially chases it around the screen with increasingly narrow frames-within-frames, pinning it down, making it sing for the artist’s own supper. Its sense of eventual claustrophobia recalls the glass box sculptures of Joseph Cornell, tight spaces where imaginary living things went to gain immobility / immortality. But here, we’re so used to equating the very image of a bird in a tree with absolute freedom that Grenier’s comic aggression is a slow-burn, provoking a tense grimace of discomfort by minute three, and a chuckling nod of assent by the second viewing. Even those of us fiercely devoted to the field of experimental cinema know all too well that it can be rather humor-impaired. No surprise, then, that a stealth anarchist like Grenier is like a breath of fresh air.” (Michael Sicinski, Green Cine Daily)
LES CHAISES (2008)
digital (XDCAM-EX 16:9), color, sound (stereo), 8:40
Two weather worn red vinyl chairs on an outdoor promontory oriented toward a “view”, stand as subjects and witnesses. The chairs themselves provide openings or internal views, into color fields, their standard issue “natural textures” upholstery, oval screens for the light projected through wind swept tree leaves.
“With Vincent Grenier’s Les Chaises (2008), the suspended moment is loosened and stretched, and like the wind that blows throughout, there’s no sense of where it starts or stops. The HD views, which should quiet once and for all any remaining skeptics of the medium, are appropriately breathtaking; under the rustling leaves of a quiet afternoon subtle gradations of light and shadow, red and green, form. In one recurring shot, Grenier fixes on the vinyl surface of a red chair, inviting us to sit and get lost in the image. The mottled reds, seemingly endless in their variation, fill the screen, and become more than an image, more than just an abstract rendering of a commonplace object, but an experience of the sublime. In Grenier’s hands, the HD camera becomes a tool for discovery, a way of seeing, an open path.” (Genevieve Yue)
STRAIGHT LINES (2009)
digital (XDCAM-EX 16:9), bw, silent, 4:40
A black and white collage in motion.
“Where Hamlyn’s film is spare in its simplicity, Vincent Grenier’s new HD video, Straight Lines, is rich in its (as contradictory as that sounds). It is nothing more than the wavering shadow cast by window blinds on a desk or table top, but Grenier has a keen sensitivity to light and colour and texture and to finding tiny, magical details in the world around us. Here, at least at first, we’re uncertain what we are looking at: the titular straight lines with a quivering black mass in the centre. It’s an abstraction, but one culled from daily life. As in many of his films and videos, Grenier allows the real world to have its play, revealing itself in delicacies of light and shadow, colour and form. It’s an instructional manual showing us how to find the same kind of miraculous little moments in our own lives.” (Patrick Friel, Senses of Cinema)
TRAVELOGUE (2010)
digital (H.264 720p), color, sound (stereo), 8m
This video was taken using small digital still camera on multiple bus trips between New York City and Upstate NY. The bus’ many large windows, afforded dramatic reflections to this perched passenger feeling as if floating through the landscape. Lulled by the noises of the tires on the road, the incessant tremors, muffled conversations and trying to keep digital camera steady while being thrown from side to side, visual wedges kept uncannily intersecting and gesturing.
BURNING BUSH (2010)
digital (XDCAM-EX 1080p), color, sound (stereo), 8.5m
Burning Bush is made from a series of mid fall shots of a bright “digital” red euonymus both in real time and with video time lapses. Much of the ideas for the piece emerged during post-production. The Euonymus mid fall “natural” leaves are startling, their colors are so saturated as to appear unreal, their purity so uniform as to appear manufactured. It has long been a fascination of mine to activate shared qualities living in parallel universes; always, that which is present in the make up of the digital cinema image and that of the physical world it is representing. Assumptions we make about the real world, the way it is recorded, or more appropriately translated, are cultural constructs. The inevitable biblical conotations of the Burning Bush refers to man made poetic as well as institutional constructs.
“A virtuosic use of video sets this burning bush alight with crimson colour and transcendent allusions.” – Andréa Picard, Wavelengths Toronto Film Festival
“Wavelengths came to the rescue again. Its second program, which was predominately made up of studies of color, began as strongly as its first, with Vincent Grenier’s digital masterpiece Burning Bush (Canada/USA). His video camera is trained on the titular plant, aflame in red, and shot with varying focal lengths, in macro and long shots, fast motion, and deep dissolves, all of which serve to remove the factuality, materiality and actuality of the bush being captured by video and instead push the recording forward towards pure, flat colors. It seems, perhaps, the ultimate digital film. A vibrant slap to the notion of digital color correction that serves to tweak and render consistent the look of movies shot on film, Burning Bush is true color correction, seeing the flat mosaic created by video as nothing but gorgeous, completely fluid values of color and hue melting into and out of one another.” (Daniel Kasman, MUBI Blog)
BACK VIEW (2011)
digital (XDCAM-EX 16:9), color, sound (stereo), 17m
The Upper West Side has some of the tallest brick apartment buildings in NYC. The orderly but deserted and aging concrete courtyards, their metal stairs and shafts, register a dramatically changing atmosphere. This is a cinema that seeks to observe, obscure, shorten and protract, and redefine, while remaining open ended.
ARMOIRE in four parts (2007-2011)
digital (XDCAM EX & DV), color, sound (stereo), 9:05
Compilation of:
Armoire Prologue (2:40, 2007)
Coda (2:30, 2009)
& two new episodes (2011)
Much of what follows Prologue is inspired by it.
TABLEAUX VIVANTS (2011)
digital (XDCAM-EX 16:9), color, silent, 9.5m
This piece was originally produced with sound, and in versions of 5.5m and 9.5m lengths, until achieving its final form as a silent piece.
Ruminations on cinematic time reversals as versatile continuums. Re-discovering the outdoors as a (stage) set where the natural is made to pose as the artifice.
“Tableaux Vivants (2011) was another stand-out. A color, silent 16:9 film shot in HD, filmmaker Vincent Grenier conjured up a beautiful meditation on nature and its illusion. Grenier appears to play with what is actual and what is imagined by using various levels of opacity with time-lapse scenes of nature, which in itself is ever changing in its own reality.” (Kirsten Studio)
WAITING ROOM (2012)
digital (AVCHD Lumix GH2 16:9), color, sound (stereo), 8:42
The pulsating rhythms of fluorescent lighting not quite in synch with those of the video image, create a singular array of drifting yellows. Camera handler and son waiting for a pediatric doctor’s appointment, while playful taunts mingle with the curious decor, the focused patients, slow blurs and daily life unfurl. Chance encounters, accidental time, in spite of everything, small miracles of cinema and being.
Many of my pieces perhaps more particularly have been hovering between home movie and phenomena, transformative space and the ordinary humdrum of the every day, also the intersection of culture and technology (both camera/video/digitality and everyday utilitarian technology). I might add the intersection between the public and my own private space, looking out for new untried ways to engage with these discussions. So to my mind this is another find, another insight into what has fascinated me.
“Vincent Grenier’s Waiting Room transforms a shark-adorned pediatric ward into pulsating, hot, disembodied yellow rhythms, the disjunction between the fluorescents and the video image resulting in small-scale transcendence.” (TIFF)
“…but he is not so much recording daily life as he is alerting us, and himself, to it. Waiting Room, his latest video, is shot at his son’s pediatrician’s office. (Note the cartoon shark on the wall.) While observing the paint and the movements and the queue at the desk, Grenier also uses his tool, the DV camera, to examine the sweeping disphasure of fluorescent lighting. It’s an amber color field, and it drones on alongside normal business. We can’t see it, but it organizes every other relationship in the room. It was right there. Someone just needed to look.” (Michael Sicinski, MUBI)
“Vincent Grenier’s video Waiting Room sustains these glimpses of family and institution. Here, the artist accompanies a young relative on a trip to the doctor’s office. In this space of pain and illness, Grenier uses his camera to document/diagnose hertz instead of hurts, capturing the gorgeous emissions of a fluorescent lamp on the verge of petering out. The resulting band-moiré patterns wash over the banality of the waiting room in incandescent yellow and green tones, drawing our focus toward the beautiful demise of this artificial light source. Sadly, expiration—both mechanical and organic—cannot be stopped by the camera, only recorded.” (Samuel La France, cinema-scope)
WATERCOLOR (FALL CREEK) (2013)
digital (H.264 Lumix GH3,16:9), color, sound (stereo), 12.5m
The onscreen titlecard reads:
WATERCOLOR
Fall Creek
but generally the film is referred to only as Watercolor in print references.
Water flows under an expressway and a railway. The path under these bridges never before seemed particularly attractive until this summer when I lingered and started to take pictures. I think the piece speaks for itself as it ended up going into so many different directions, emerging from concerns about space, the pictorial plane and a particularly interesting intersection between man made structures (both visually and aurally) and a changing, surprising nature. Watercolor (Fall Creek) exists between these necessary worlds, as time unfolds and remains difficult to comprehend.
What was, what has become, what’s left, what’s new, what is, what is made up, what is lighted, reflected, hidden, made transparent, or unknown, different rates of changes, matter of various kinds, all intent on affirming competing realities, spread themselves on the wide cinema screen both literally and figuratively. Where the how has as much to do with the is.
“Islands. O for God’s sake they are connected underneath” — Muriel Rukeyser
“In Watercolor Vincent Grenier reveals something we all know, but continually forget: the world is always making movies. Flows of reflection, contingencies of light, movement within frames surround us. But it takes a filmmaker of vision and an ability to linger to reminds us of this essential fact of our visual world. Color flows, light glints and patterns of amazement superimpose themselves in layers of viscous sight. A wonder to behold. This is I think (his) masterpiece and one of the most beautiful films I know.” (Tom Gunning)
DE-ICING (2014)
digital (H.264 Lumix GH3,16:9), color, sound (stereo), 8:15
Audio montage from music by John Cage, Variations IV, Excerpts 8pm to 9pm & 9pm to 10 pm.
Energetic audio montage finely re-contextualizes and layers framed displays of giant mechanized insect spouting heat and liquids.
INTERSECTION (2015)
digital (XDCAM EX 16:9), color, sound (stereo), 7m
On the corner of Brooktondale Rd and route 79 near Ithaca is an amazing planting of Forget-Me-Nots and Dandelions. An improbable dance between different layers of reality, one organic, the other mechanical, another the numbing everyday. Timeless fragility joust with fleeting enamels and the upstanding violence.
PENDING (2016)
digital (H.264 Lumix GH3,16:9), color, sound, 9m
Video shot in and around Ithaca, NY and Québec City, Canada.
A collage more than a diary using images as artifacts that reflect processes. Sounds often come from other rooms, altered by their distance and the spaces that they have come through, just as the images themselves reflect the history of their own alterations. It is also a humorous exploration of the ideas of vignetting as it frames, highlights, distances and alters space.
COMMUTE (2018)
digital (HD 4:3), color, sound (stereo), 6m
Distinct fields on the same screen, foreground each other, invite comparisons, between different times and spaces, and the constructed and natural processes that inescapably defines us thru textures and emotional spaces. Commute does refer to regular travels between one place and an other, but also to substitutions, and exchanges.
WISHBONE (2021)
digital (HD 4:3), color, sound (stereo), 1:10
“Wishbone, Grenier’s new film, is just over one minute long, and according to its maker, it was something he created during the Covid lockdown. This makes sense, given that Wishbone is primarily about collapsing the distinction between inside and outside, with particular focus on the thin glass membranes (windows, windshields) that we use to mark that divide.
“The basis of Wishbone is a still life on a tabletop near a window. In addition to a small figurine of a Buddha-like weightlifter, and a nondescript glass prism, the composition is anchored by the titular wishbone. It is situated inside two different drinking glasses, its branches contained as it tapers into a juncture that hovers between both containers. But this still life doesn’t remain still for long. Grenier overlays the tabletop with a flowing river, complete with a rower in a tiny kayak. (Admittedly, this micro-figure reminded me of the old Ty-D-Bol commercials, with the little man paddling through the toilet.)
“The second half of Wishbone is mostly superimposed on this first part, and it is comprised of footage shot from a car, as someone is driving through a forest road. Grenier’s fractured superimposition makes it difficult to discern what is actually seen outside the windshield, versus what is merely reflected upon it. These are the sort of visual ambiguities that have long been a favored subject in Grenier’s work (cf. 2011’s Armoire or the more recent Commute from 2018), but of course they reflect a new level of anxiety in the wake of the pandemic. In its brevity, Wishbone is a bit like a commercial for the new normal, the simultaneous presence of our previous lives and its inaccessibility.” (Michael Sicinski)
MOONRISE (2022)
digital (4K 16:9), bw, sound (stereo), 4.5m
From an idea by Etienne Grenier
Image and sound by Vincent Grenier
A montage of everyday sounds that impersonate rain drops, anthropomorphize eyeball floaters. A film for the mind.
INSTALLATIONS/ETC.
TETE A TETE (1992) (w/ Mary Zebell)
Video installation, color, sound, 8m looped
A two monitor installation & multi media with sound. Exhibited in storefront window of Changes, an Ithaca hair salon. Made in collaboration with Mary Zebell. July 1 – 31, 1992 Two 8 min. loops.
Installation used different sections of Display, (1992) 16 min. Hi 8, an earlier version of Winter Collection (2002) 4:30 min. The two VHS video sections, about 8 min.each, were synchronized with each other and looped. Two monitors were mounted on top of the back of two chairs. One of the chairs was a baby high chair and held a small monitor while the other, a Victorian chair, held a 20” monitor. The chairs were painted black and collaged with fragments of newspaper headlines and ads by artist Mary Zebell. Sound was made available to passerby from a concealed opening above the storefront. (Photo is not of actual storefront exhibition but was taken afterwards at the home of artists.)
COLOR/TIME/SHIFT (2004) (w/ Mary Zebell)
Video installation, four screens, color, sound
A four screen installation & multimedia with stereo sound based on video Color Study made in collaboration with Mary Zebell.
This piece was designed to occupy, in its entirety, a large room adjacent to the Lobby of the Park School at Ithaca College. It ran continuously for the duration of the opening, Oct 22, 2004
Commissioned along with second multiple screen video installation: “Winter Collection Exhibit” by Ithaca College Provost Office for the Opening of the 8th Finger Lakes Environment Film Festival on Oct 22, 2004.
The installation deploys four looping versions of Grenier’s 4.5 minute digital video Color Study. Each monitor is delayed by five second intervals in a continuous performance. In Color Study, changes in dramatic abstract visual spaces are threaded into photographic source material, suggesting comparisons. In the installation, the time shifts between each screen reverberate with the manufactured time manipulations in the original single channel version of Color Study, underscoring the interfaces between analog and digital, space and time, single screen and multiple platforms. Color/Time/Shift is a humorous, digitally induced meditation on colors, motion and space from a few frames of fall panorama from a roadside in upstate New York.
WINTER COLLECTION EXHIBIT (2004) (w/ Mary Zebell)
Video installation – multiple screens, color, sound
A six monitor installation & multimedia with sound based on video Winter Collection made in collaboration with Mary Zebell.
This piece was installed in the Lobby of the Park School at Ithaca College. Commissioned along with multiple screen video installation: Color/Time/Shift by Ithaca College Provost Office for the Opening of the 8th Finger Lakes Environment Film Festival on Oct 22, 2004. It ran continuously for the duration of the opening.
A pile of differently sized video monitors displays a loop of Winter Collection, Grenier’s 4.5 minute video originally shot in Hi 8 on a winter day in 1992, the last day Ithacans could have their dry garbage and cast-offs hauled away for free by the city of Ithaca. Huge piles of debris and broken household items had accumulated on curbsides throughout the city, awaiting disposal. Then it snowed. These piles, the broken kinks of the comfort machine of consumerism, offer voyeuristic opportunities for incongruous art happenings. The camera collaborates with an old Toyota car, which doubles as a dolly, to photograph these found art installations offered in front yards. These random, quotidian piles transform with monster-like auras and new-found permanence. The Toyota also supplies the musique concrete soundtrack. The installation puns and riffs the concept of recycling and waste through interface, sound, spatial configurations, and mise-en-abyme.
The Vincent Grenier and Mary Zebell collaborative installations were supported by the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies, Cinema on the Edge, and the Cinema Studies area of the Department of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca.
LIGHTSTRUCK 