Nelson Henricks
by Vicky Chainey Gagnon
There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct color - dim pinks and blues - which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become—I don't know what... Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall” 1921
Canadian artist Nelson Henricks is inspired by daily life
and personal experience. His videotapes are clever weaves of sound, image and
text in which various forms of writing create “small fugitive spaces that allow
the viewer/ listener to reflect and interpret – something that seems both a rarity
and a luxury in contemporary society.”(1).
The intimate imagistic spaces he carves out show traces of the visual styles
of experimental film, video art, literature and popular culture and address issues
of communication, identity and invisibility.(2)
In the fragmented and episodic narrative of Time Passes(3)
an anxious view of language is charted. Impermanence and contradictions in meaning
are framed within an ever-shifting temporal landscape where the treatment of
time, intrinsic to the video medium, is condensed and details become contracted.
Streams of light move across the planes of Henricks’ Montréal apartment, gradually
displacing a series of moments as a metaphor for the contained and fluid rhythm
of time passing. In counterpoint, a fragmented architecture of space features
pixellated images of Henricks frantic in the act of writing. The visceral soundtrack
of his hand scrawling on a page are separate from the fluid images lining the
videotape, adding a disjointed sense of absence. Provocative text emerges in
the black fields of the video frames, telling us: “No place is as real as this
room and “We write in order to disappear.” The words, imbedded deep and unexpectedly
into the channels of video space, resonate across the videotape with weight and
point to a presence that can never fully be recaptured – the physical presence
of the body in the act of communication.
Time Passes is inspired by the writings of Virginia Woolf and like the famed
author’s fiction, Henricks emphasizes patterns of consciousness rather than sequences
of events in the external world, creating a video form that translates the subjectivity
of inner life. Rooms provide vectors of illumination where meaning is unwrapped
in tense transfers of time, and the passage of the imagination through language
is made literal. As pages accumulate into volumes of signs, Henricks reminds
us of the struggle to fix meaning and claim the imperceptible. A slow spiral
is traced on the blankness of the waiting page and a longing is inscribed that
cannot be reconciled. Permanence is fractured, like the illusion of transparency
in language made apparent in Time Passes. Through the eyes of the camera we see
an indigo blue sky melting into the radiant pink sunrise, and similarly, a gradual
dissolution is at work within language, ever changing and eroding, like the time
passing.