Nelson Henricks - Prix Robert-Forget 2024

My true introduction to video came thanks to Emmedia, an artist-run video access centre directed by Grant Poier and Vern Hume. Their recruitment of college and university students through a scholarship program contributed much to the growth of video as a creative medium in Calgary. I borrowed a bulky JVC VHS deck that had a shoulder-mounted video camera attached to it and filmed spoken-word performances in my bedroom. Emmedia also owned a 4-track cassette recorder, and the JVC allowed you to dub sound onto prerecorded video cassettes. I projected Super 8 film on the wall of my studio, videotaped it, and dubbed music onto it. My first videos were made this way. By the time I graduated in 1986, I had built up a corpus of eight or nine videos. Instead of writing a graduate thesis, I made a thesis video. My advisor fell asleep watching it.

In the 1980s, Calgary was a painting town, but not without a high quota of accomplished sculptors. The full-time artists employed by the art school, combined with the cadre of professors teaching in the art department at the University of Calgary––plus the ever-growing number of graduates from both schools––meant that Calgary had a thriving, if isolated, art scene. As a recently graduated, now emerging artist, it was easy to get traction in a medium that was underrepresented in a community that saw itself as progressive and cutting edge. Many emerging artists were drawn to video and performance art. Part of this was due to economics––performance was cheap––but it was also the itchings of a generation raised on television. There was something exciting about making TV. Fellow ACA graduate Colleen Kerr and I co-produced Camera Obscura (1988), a twelve-episode series at a local community cable station. Critics, curators, and arts funders were taking notice. After a survey exhibition of under-30 artists committed to video and performance was presented at the Nickle Arts Museum in 1988, some of this attention felt tinged with resentment.

Even before graduating from ACA, I was hired at Off Centre Centre, Calgary’s oldest and most respected artist-run gallery. Sandra Vida and Don Mabie (a.k.a. Chuck Stake) were active mail artists, but their practices also encompassed performance and in Sandy’s case, film and video. After working with them for a few months, I officially assumed the title of assistant coordinator. Meanwhile, I was elected to the board of directors of Emmedia and moved into an apartment in the same building, which also housed another artist-run centre, Second Story Gallery. I was seeing a lot of art and meeting a lot of people, but, by 1991, I felt like I had done everything I could do. I was now the gallery coordinator and I had shown in most of the local venues. Homophobic abuse, often in the form of slurs screamed from moving cars, occurred on an almost weekly basis. Alcohol was becoming a bigger part of my life. The future looked bleak. A change of city seemed necessary.

And so, the big question: would I move to Vancouver, or would I move to Montreal? I had a few contacts in Vancouver, but some close friends had recently moved to Montreal. I also knew many Quebec artists through my involvement in the Calgary art scene. Luc Bourdon claims I met him at Emmedia, but I don’t recall this. I do remember meeting Daniel Dion and Gisèle Trudel on some dark street, one cold and wintry night in Banff. Legend (1988) was presented at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma: it and some other titles were picked up by Vidéographe distribution. Jean Gagnon noticed my work and invited me to sit on a Canada Council jury, where I met Jean Décarie and Lorraine Dufour. On trips to Ottawa for juries, I would visit Montreal. At one dining room table, I met Sylvie Tourangeau, Charles Guilbert, and Serge Murphy, people with whom I am still in contact today.

Ultimately, the decision to move to Montreal boiled down to this: did I want to learn French? My performances were preoccupied with language and translation. Learning French was a way to dig deeper into this question. Calgary was a new city, like a city that had just come out of the box. Montreal, meanwhile, had the grime of centuries, a rough yet comfortable, lived-in feel that reminded me of New York. It was also cheap—so cheap, in fact, that I had planned to move to the city and live on Employment Insurance alone. Alas, cooler heads prevailed and encouraged me to go to university. After finishing more ambitious videos such as Murderer’s Song (1991) and Conspiracy of Lies (1992) I was beginning to feel that my lack of formal education in moving image production was a deficit. So, I applied to Concordia––but I wasn’t accepted into film production initially. Instead, I got into a BFA program in film studies.

That first five months in Montreal, from August to December 1991, was the closest I have ever come to experiencing an identity crisis. I remember believing that I was no longer an artist, that I was done with art making. I felt old and out of sync with my cohort, and gravitated toward socializing with international students from Chile, Lebanon, and Iran. Though the rent was low, my financial resources were even lower, and by December I desperately needed a roommate. As luck would have it, Nik Forrest, another newly arrived refugee from the prairie artist-run scene, moved in with me in January 1992. We bonded and christened our apartment “The Tinsel Bordello.” Nik and their then-girlfriend Annie Martin were enrolled in the Studio Arts MFA program at Concordia. Through them, I encountered a peer group of similar age and predilections. During the February 1992 reading week, I started dating Pierre Beaudoin. Things were falling into place.

In my second year at Concordia, I transferred to film production. I was now shooting with 16mm film, which gave my first Montreal productions a distinct aesthetic appeal. The bilingual Comédie (1994) was a school project. Emission (1994) translated a series of Calgary performances about language and animals to the screen. My graduate film Shimmer (1995), however, was a breakthrough. It consolidated everything I had been thinking about in Calgary with everything I had learned and felt in Montreal. Crush (1997), an addendum/remake of Emission made with a Bolex borrowed from Robert Morin, crystallized these advances.

In 1995, a few months after graduation, I got my first teaching job at Concordia. Luc Bourdon and Catherine Tweedy were developing a video program in Studio Arts and needed help. Luc had faith in me as a researcher and was confident that I could lead the newly minted “Video History and Theory” course. In the early years, I co-taught with Jean Gagnon, who was still the video curator at the National Gallery of Canada, and John Zeppetelli, who had recently returned from sojourns in Europe and America. It was also Luc who brought me into the fold of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, once he had moved on from Concordia. Luc flew me to London, England, to curate a program of British videos in 1997. This trip was formative. One could see a clear demarcation between an older generation labouring in experimental film and video art for the festival circuit, within which they remained marginalized, versus a younger generation of artists who were superseding them, showing in museums and galleries where they enjoyed greater visibility and prestige. At that moment, I decided I wanted to be a gallery artist.

From roughly 1995 to 2000, I mostly presented my videos at festivals, but I sensed I was in the wrong context. Shorts programs could be a real hodgepodge, and some programmers didn’t understand work coming from the art world. Screen time was also an issue. My videos were often the result of years of labour. A twelve-minute video presented once, in a Montreal festival before an audience of twenty people, was effectively scorched earth: it would never be shown again. Meanwhile, a video loop in a gallery could be presented for months and (in theory) reach larger audiences. I also felt misunderstood by my peers in the festival world. There was an expectation that one would “graduate” from this silly video art nonsense and eventually make feature-length films. No one ever asked if I wanted to write a book, record an album, or make a multi-screen installation, all of which seemed like more viable and compelling options.

I began exploring multi-screen, first with Handy Man (1999) and later with performance-based pieces such as Fuzzy Face (2001) and Happy Hour (2002), which employed affective ready-mades (objects charged with feeling) as aesthetic counterpoints to video projections. These pieces also used architecture as a form of montage. The questions of juxtaposed imagery and spatial montage were central to the development of the double-screen installations Satellite (2004) and Map of the City (2006). My multimedia installations The Sirens (2008) and 2287 Hz (2011) integrated screens, speakers, guitar amps, oscilloscopes, and lightbulbs as sculptural objects. A growing fascination with seeing sound, visual music, and synaesthesia motivated much that followed in the 2010s.

So why is my work hard to write about? To be honest, I have no idea, but I think the other writers here have done an admirable job of proving me wrong. Perhaps one factor that has made my practice difficult to assess was an early abandonment of a singular coherent style. Each project was guided by a distinct set of impulses and goals. I remember one curator, confronted with my duration performance installation Fuzzy Face, muttering quizzically, “I thought you were the guy who did those romantic videos?” (She was probably referring to Shimmer.) In any case, my treatment of “style” as a temporary device, rather than a fixed template, meant that my practice could be perceived as lacking integrity or, worse, coherency.

But I never craved consistency: what could be queerer than that? Mutability was a way to keep an experimental dimension of my practice open and operative. Furthermore, if you experience a series of my works, you begin to see that methods, themes, and motifs do repeat, albeit not always in a linear fashion. Tools and ideas are picked up and cast away, only to reappear in an entirely new form years later. The videos, installations, photos, paintings, etc., constitute a kind of network––you need to see a lot of things before the connections emerge––and this can be a daunting (read: impossible) task for anyone with limited time and resources.

And to the person who disagrees with the above, I would say: I agree. This introduces the second maddening characteristic of my practice: its ability to state a hypothesis and then proceed to spend a lot of time investigating why the opposite might be true. On these shifting sands, I will build my monument. When you enter my world, you aren’t given any stable ground to stand on: everything is provisional. In this way, my art practice at least poses a challenge to binary thinking. It opens a hinge dimension, a new direction that isn’t a compromise between one thing or another.