2015

This was the outcome of a Dexter Sinister commission to make a post-hoc publication for an exhibition of 1960s–70s Canadian conceptual art at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany. As the show had already toured Canada with a comprehensive catalogue, there was little sense in making a second version of what would essentially be the same book, so we proposed instead to make a video-catalogue. A good proportion of the works in the show were moving image or audio, and this format would allow for the inclusion of excerpts to give a better sense of the collection. 

The result is an extremely high-speed—and slightly tongue-in-cheek—dash through the show’s five sections, with each still or moving piece of work on-screen for a few seconds, just enough time for a quick voiceover description and accompanying on-screen caption before moving on to the next, along with an intermittent reminder: “This video has been compressed: press pause at any time.” We were influenced by the cartoon science-fiction trope of an entire meal being compressed into a single convenient pill—or its proxy in this case, a tiny USB flash drive, which came in a small bag along with a booklet of extended captions.

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