Happy Hour

Happy Hour is part of a series of performance-based works that use the comparison of two images as a starting point. When we compare two things (images, pieces of music, texts, etc.) we become conscious of what moves between them: meanings that are difficult to articulate as they lie at the very limits of language. The video component of this photo-based installation attempts to materialize the immaterial "ghosts" of meaning which flow in the space between two images.

Happy Hour takes as its starting point two photographs: the first is an image of me at age twelve on Christmas morning. I am sitting under the Christmas tree beside a pile of gifts. I have just opened a present: a digital alarm clock. I pose for the camera, holding the alarm clock that would wake me for school, jobs and university for the next twenty years. The second image is a reconstruction of the first, taken when I was 38. Aging, the loss of innocence, the inversion of pleasure (spontaneous joy) and work (reconstructed happiness), revisionist memory, and so on. I choose not to articulate these significations verbally, and have instead created a video component that amplifies these fugitive meanings

EXHIBITIONS November 8 - December 13 2003, Galérie B-312, Montréal, Québec.