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Mark Lewis

09.26.08 - 10.19.08
Video — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Mark Lewis, Musée les Abattoirs, 2008, ©DR, Le Printemps de septembre - à Toulouse

Mark Lewis, Musée les Abattoirs, 2008, ©DR, Le Printemps de septembre - à Toulouse

Mark Lewis, Musée les Abattoirs, 2008, ©DR, Le Printemps de septembre - à Toulouse

Born in 1957 in Hamilton (Canada), he lives in London.

 

The Canadian artist Mark Lewis has been at work for some years on a re-treatment of film: like an anatomist, he dissects in his own films, often short pieces, the component parts, and reworks the emblematic figures of the tracking shot, the extra and the credits. He thus offers the viewer an exercise in decoding, a strange experience of déjà vu, and thus puts back together again his own, exploded idea of a “permanent cinema”. 

 

Continuing his cinema in bits operation, the Canadian Mark Lewis will be screening a series of films, old and new: The Fight (2008), Prater Hauptallee (2008), Spadina Reverse Dolly, Zoom, Nude (2006), 122 Leadenhall Street (2007) and Bricklayers Arms (2008) a film coproduced by Le Jeu de Paume.


What does art enable you to do?

I'm not sure that art enables me to do anything outside its own logic and rules. And this, right now, means for me that I'm trying to introduce something of my daily relation to modern life into forms involving film and photography, the better to understand and appreciate both the image and my everyday life. I suppose, in a more general way, that we might say that according to Kant, the disinterested, objective character of art encourages us to stop, take time, and not reduce an encounter with art to economic ends. But people do so in any event, and they do it in their own way, and not at the request of the work of art. A work is appropriate to this kind of objective involvement or experience, but I don't think that this is produced. Perhaps a sign of quality for art would be that the viewer wants to stop. But then, when you think about it, it's really the doing of the viewer, and not the work of the piece.