NEW YORK and VISA, 1985, 3:30/4:30
Someone once said to me that everyone's first tapes should be labelled as such. And it would be almost true to say that NEW YORK is my first tape, but not quite. After slaving away over a Super 8 editor for several months in 1985, I finally completed two films: VISA and NEW YORK. VISA was a mainly an exercise in learning how to edit, and was later remodeled and recycled as the opening sequence of LEGEND. It is essentially a road movie, with some shots of high-rises (and battered kite trapped on a powerline), thrown in for good measure.

With the gruelling experience of editing VISA still fresh in my mind, NEW YORK was edited very little: the visuals appear in exactly the same order as they were filmed, except for the closing shot. (The main location was the observation deck of the Barbizon Plaza Hotel on Central Park South, now closed and converted into condos.) When I became a member at EM/Media in late 1985, one of the first things I did was transfer NEW YORK to VHS by reshooting it off the wall of my studio at the Alberta College of Art. This allowed me to add on the ethereal guitar soundtrack, which I performed direct to tape the night before a class crit. When the tape was bumped up to 3/4", a mono mix of the guitar track and studio noises was made.


ENOLA GAY, 1986, 2:00
I wrote a poem called ENOLA GAY on the fortieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. It was later published in Blue Buffalo Magazine, for which I received the handsome fee of ten dollars. Encouraged by this success, the ENOLA GAY was transformed into an impromptu performance piece, which in turn became the basis for this tape. It was shot on VHS in my bedroom at my parent's house over the 1985 Christmas holidays at about 11 at night. My parents must have wondered.


RAIN, 1986, 5:20
Recorded about ten minutes after ENOLA GAY, RAIN narrates a more or less true to life account of a my first bad break-up. More precisely, it describes that exact moment when I woke up and discovered I was no longer in love. Appropriately enough, I performed this text in the nude (I couldn't decide what to wear). The left and right channels (two different readings of the same text) were recorded on different days, mainly because the location sound was poor. They fall in and out of sync with each other, creating an oddly schizophrenic effect.


DREAM, 1986, 5:40
Perhaps the original STUPID VIDEO. DREAM is -- quite literally -- me sitting on the floor of my parent's living room, reading a dream out of my journal. At this time, I was very interested in the notion of story-telling. My idea was to make a series of videos (RAIN, DREAM and HOME) in which the viewer created the action in his or her head. Interesting concept, but alas, dubious results. An accidental comedy.


DANCE, 1986, 3:00
In the mid-eighties 'appropriation' was the word and television was everyone's favorite demon. Many of my works at this time were blunt unschooled broadsides against "mass media", which I (probably rightly) blamed for almost every evil imaginable. Now TV and I are friends again, but that is another story. Inspired somewhat by the emergence of rap music and 'scratch video', DANCE was shot directly off the television and uses footage derived almost exclusively from a single documentary on the history of dance. Shots of an South Asian dancer culled from a local cable station juxtaposed with the sexy, slutty strutting of the 'Solid Gold Dancers' created ironic lines of flight into -- and out of -- the wild world of dance. The soundtrack is a little ditty my friends Judy and Steve and I whipped up in a single afternoon. Mix bongos, maracas, a wood block and an analog synthesizer with (gasp!) non-musicians and -- voila! -- an almost convincing instant groove!


STUPID VIDEO, 1986, 2:40
My friend David P. Smith said to me, 'I made a video once, but it was a stupid video." This video is almost as dumb as the title implies: a dazzling array of cheap special effects coupled with backwards messages and a cheezy electronic soundtrack that was meant to be as much a parody of mid-eighties rock video as it was of artless video art. STUPID VIDEO was the first of my works to go into wide distribution. Fun fact: Years later I learned that STUPID VIDEO was broadcast on Hungarian national television.


INDUSTRY, 1986, 3:30
A friend introduced me to this strange house in the Highfield district of Calgary. I was immediately seized by the poignancy of this beautiful old residential clapboard house smack dab in the middle of a grim industrial wasteland. 'Surely this must be indicative of... something', I thought, trekking out with my video camera on a mild winter's day. The result is a portrait of the house as well as some vague commentary on… industrialization? urban planning? pollution? I don't think I had anything that deliberate in mind, save to create a document of this site which seemed resonant with fugitive meanings.


SALOMÉ, 1986, 3:20
My friend Myke Maier, who is now a successful artist and illustrator, was doing a photo shoot and invited me to tag along. The set-up was loosely based on one of Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations for Oscar Wilde's 'Salomé'. I edited the footage to a song by Artie Shaw called 'Nightmare'. Fun fact: Louise and Iain Baxter helped out with this one, in fact, Louise is in the title role.


UNTITLED, 1986, 1:00
UNTITLED description: An excerpt from the compilation TEN TOLLS FROM THE BELL BLOCK, UNTITLED is one of ten videos produced during a workshop conducted by Paulette Phillips and Geoffrey Shea, andsponsored by EM/Media. Both my apartment and EM/Media were housed in the Bell Block, a three-story, turn of the century brick building in Calgary's downtown core. A short story about architecture forms the backbone of this sketch. Colleen Kerr was filmed lying at the bottom of the central stairwell, one of the more intriguing aspects of the building. She reads a background voice-over: a litany of daily routines.

This work is not for distribution. For consultation only.