Exhibitions

• Threesixty

  KEVIN HANLEY
  March 19–April 23, 2005

  Kevin Hanley is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice includes video, photography, performance and sound. Engaging with the slippery relationship between time, memory and reason, Hanley is best known for structural studies in which he eliminates linear narrative. His humorous investigations into the mechanics of media toy with imagery by distorting the functions of space, movement, sound, context and color to create new perspectives.

  Threesixty is a lifesize video installation of a skateboarder doing a 360 degree turn while cameras shoot him from four angles. The footage is edited so that the skater, while turning, appears to stay still while the room turns around him. The result is a collapse of linearity and a presentation of an impossible view (a view not possible from the subjective position of the skateboarder or cameras, only available to the viewer of the video installation). Hanley draws a parallel between music DJing techniques and his visual work with an interest in the writing and reading of the record (according to Adorno, the record’s message is ‘simultaneously fixed and hidden’, delivering an abstract indexical writing contained within the groove). Accordingly, in the video work Re-counting a Dancing Man, Hanley manually moves the footage of a store-bought Fred Astaire dance performance giving it the appearance of jumping forward and back akin to a DJ’s record scratching.

  Threesixty is the first in a two part series that takes the mixing of music and video as a starting point. Hanely’s exhibition, his first in Canada, is followed by the work of London artist Christian Kuras who also manipulates visual imagery through a relationship to the treatment of sound. Hanley’s suspension of action and conflated viewpoints sets up a dialogue with Kuras’ work that examines the hearing and seeing of looped sound to reflect upon a self-contained circularity of power.