Artspeak
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Jamie Hilder has his MA in English from Simon Fraser University and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of British Columbia. His work has been shown in Vancouver at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Artspeak, and the Audain Gallery.
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Heather Passmore is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been exhibited in Vancouver and nationally, including a solo show at the Odd Gallery, Dawson City, Yukon and at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, and she has published essays and articles locally.
Exhibitions
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JAMIE HILDER, HEATHER PASSMORE
June 11–July 16, 2005The work of Jamie Hilder and Heather Passmore collectively examines memory, transience and physical movement, both habitual and occasional. Approaching individual travel through situationist references and archival material, Hilder and Passmore’s works mark histories of movement in urban space and the habits resulting from and reflecting such environments. The exhibition title, Banlieusard, connotes the commuter. Artists such as Van Gogh and Monet who were working in Paris at the end of the 19th century, were enormously interested in the suburbs, or banlieu, and sought to represent the modern spaces between city and country. The traveller between these spaces is a flaneur of sorts, as posited by Hilder’s personal travels and Passmore’s appropriated ones.
Jamie Hilder’s large wall drawing depicts his movements through the urban environment over the course of a year. It is a document of the performance of daily life and highlights its banality. Loosely modeled after the map included in Internationale Situationniste No.1 (published in 1958), Hilder’s drawing marks paths traveled based on frequency, darker lines indicating habitual movement. The spectacle of urban/suburban daily life is reinacted and mapped by Hilder as a caricature of the concept of poetic movement and the psychogeographical experiments of the situationists.
Heather Passmore works with found archives and collections. In contrast to Hilder’s personal travels, Passmore appropriates another’s personal images of travel. Her Travel Shots, a slide projection piece, chronicles an individual’s international travels, generic photographic slides largely taken from the inside of a car of the sights and landscapes beyond. The slides have degraded over time and offer a strained window onto the world, a vision slowly being lost. Paralleling human aging and loss of sight, the images in Travel Shots reveal memories and vision to be as unstable, fleeting and delicate as the medium that seeks to capture them.
Publications
Banlieusard
Title: Banlieusard
Category: Exhibition Catalogue
Artist: Jamie Hilder, Heather Passmore
Writers: Anne Lesley Selcer
Editor: Melanie O’Brian
Design: Jan Dvorak, Betty Beck
Publisher: Artspeak
Printer: Generation Printing, Vancouver
Year published: 2005
Pages: 32pp
Cover: Paper
Binding: Perfect Bound
Process: Offset
Features: Printed double-sided, Foldout paper jacket
Dimensions: 13 x 13.5 x 1 cm
Weight: 100 g
ISBN: 0-921394-52-7
Price: $5 CDN
Framing individual experience, the publication Banlieusard approaches the liminal territory of the commuter or traveler. Artists Jamie Hilder and Heather Passmore and author Anne Lesley Selcer map subjective knowledge and a history of movement in urban and suburban space. Together in this publication, the works reconsider the spectacle of daily life, memory, the real, and the problematics of aesthetics through nostalgized strategies to offer a strained window into quotidian vision.
The format of the publication takes its queue from mapping, both the road map and serialized image collecting, to reflect an experience that is textual and palpable. As Hilder’s work reconsiders (and aestheticizes) Situationist mapping methods, the publication ultimately turns the maps into objects. Passmore’s work presents the distant geography of a solitary roadtripper while Selcer’s text inhabits the potential narrative and reimbues the images with subjective observations.
The sightseer’s practice (collecting sights which have already been seen), suggests that memory is always a recollection. His work murmurs softly, “technology designs history.”
-Anne Lesley Selcer
Banlieusard is published on the occasion of an Artspeak exhibition of the same name that included work by Jamie Hilder and Heather Passmore (June 11 and July 16, 2005).