Film shown first at: Optical Verve, (curator Syvie Fortin) in the Ottawa Art gallery in Ottawa, Canada (february 15 - April 12 2001)
The development of cities, wheter planned or organic, has always reflected contemporary idioms of vision.........
The exhibition Optical verve explores the relationship between the global city (territory), its inhabitants (bodies),
and post-photographic vision. It poses a series of questions: How are urban and electronic spaces socially constructed
together? How is presence conceptualized in and across these two spaces? How do these spaces define social constructions
and contemporary urbanism? How are they imaged, Imagined, and spatially deployed in the city?.....................
Peter Spaans 's No Way Out, 1998, an unedited 53 minute late afternoon video / audio walk through the streets of midtown Manhattan,
foregrounds embodied and distributed vision through a strange immedicy of mediation as the camera becomes an extension of the
artist 's body and a witness of his negotiation of the city. Superseding imaging conventions, this subjective, embodied and
transitory technique represents the producer within the image. In turn, his presence creates an awareness of ours, a non-coercive
delegation-in-viewing that foregrounds our role in production.............................
MORE PHOTOGRAPHS NO WAY OUT