Rectangular World

Andrew J Paterson

March 15 – May 5, 2019

Rectangular World, 2006, 09:00 minutes, colour, English

A Typical Morning for Green and Blue, 2009, 08:12 minutes, colour, English

Courtesy of Vtape                            

Andrew James Paterson is a Canadian inter-media artist active with video, film, writing, performance, curation, and musical performance. Much of Paterson’s work is concerned with the tensions between bodies, technologies, and institutions. He engages in a playful questioning of language, philosophy, community and capitalism. His video or media works over the past decade use original and manipulated still-images often resembling colour-field paintings.

Rectangular World is structured upon a telephone conversation between two unseen artists and/or cultural observers. These friends, who agree to look out for each other, discuss and argue the definitions and limitations of loaded words such as "community" and "scene" and "society", both with regard to themselves and also to a recently deceased young-male colleague who didn't fit into any easily-defined scene or community. Visually, Rectangular World is completely cameraless. It consists almost entirely of Photoshop drawings that resemble serial low-income housing units, minimalist sculpture and abstract paintings. A scanned photograph which may or may not represent the deceased youth periodically occurs, and flickering black and white images appear in windows relating to the rectangular buildings. The flickering may or may not have something to do with the intense thunderstorm audible on the video’s soundtrack.

A Typical Morning for Green and Blue consists of two parallel split-frame image streams which are interrupted by bits of dialogue - perhaps the ghost of a screen or stage play. Verbal language never co-exists with the image streams or montages, although there are traces of verbal language in the images, some of which contain rectangular letters of the alphabet. These visuals are accompanied by single musical tones - think of refrigerators with pitch. The dialogue between Green and Blue suggests either long-term lovers or perhaps over-familiar housemates. Green and Blue wander in and out of their everyday concerns - tea, the weather, viruses, and memorials. Poetic and multi-layered, these early video works push the limits of the medium in unexpected, surprising and engaging ways.