Vincent Grenier
2021Watercolor (Fall Creek)
Vincent Grenier
Water flows under two bridges, or so it may appear. Since the advent of the industrial age, there has been a heated dialogue regarding the relationship between earth's natural environment and manufactured human spaces. Watercolor (Fall Creek) exists between these necessary worlds, as time unfolds and remains difficult to comprehend.
Watercolor (Fall Creek)
Interieur Interiors (To A-K)
Vincent Grenier
Changes of spatial relationships, scales, locations, and materials are intimated with recognisable 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.
Interieur Interiors (To A-K)
White Revolved
Vincent Grenier
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 a magnified), crossing the fram. Other times the grain is left to itself.
White Revolved
Le puits de lumière
Vincent Grenier
"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.
Light Shaft
Les Chaises
Vincent Grenier
"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." -VG
The Chairs
Window Wind Chimes: Part 1
Vincent Grenier
"'Window Wind Chimes' 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.
Window Wind Chimes: Part 1
Pending
Vincent Grenier
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.
Pending
La toile
Vincent Grenier
"'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
Shade
Travelogue
Vincent Grenier
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.
Travelogue
You
Vincent Grenier
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.
You
While Revolved
Vincent Grenier
Project at 18 fps. 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. Made with a grant from the Canada Council.
While Revolved
Commute
Vincent Grenier
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.
Commute
World in Focus
Vincent Grenier
In “World in Focus,” the screen becomes the two-dimensional support of an amazingly versatile three-dimensional object (an atlas) which contains in turn two-dimensional pictures of other three-dimensional objects. The uniform use of a close-up lens creates often ambiguous or nearly unidentifiable images (from the atlas), emphasizing the rhythms, volumes, angles and movements obtained from the handling of the book.
World in Focus
