neige noire

16mm dual-projection “Carl Brown makes celluloid dance. [His] new film work will burn colours so deeply into your brain, you’ll be watching a light show inside your eyelids for hours. Titled Neige Noir (‘Black Snow’), a name that conjures up Toronto winters but actually refers to the trenches of the First World War, the piece is a visual feast… “It opens with a calming sequence of manipulated representations of a swimmer and the sea set to a lulling jazz tune, and then crashes into a steady techno and white noise assault with pulsating images. Brown radically alters the celluloid itself, experimenting like a mad scientist to create gorgeous colour patterns. He sometimes refilms an image up to eight times to bring its dance of distortion to a climax. Any single still from this film could bring you to a stop in an art gallery, and Brown gives us some 86,000 of them.” – Thomas Hirschmann, NOW Magazine (October 2003) Wrapped in the skin of this form that is known as the body lies the memories and the soul of that self. So too, the skin of the film is the emulsion which holds together all the photochemical secrets just under its surface. This work is a testament to my unwrapping of these two energies and blending those photochemical secrets with my energy of unconscious…sometime conscious memories of events that took place upon the expulsion of the one life to the other. A metamorphosis that can really only be understood when standing in a foreign place. A region of myself and of film that as of to this point had not been charted. I create the destination and the two skins begin to crack and peel like a first good sunburn. Underneath rages all the chromatic scale of emotion, that will give birth to the notion, a new beginning…..Neige Noire….things in description time duration emulsion water molecular movement grain the constant kinetic movement that consists of the foreground/background only the eye can see soft sliding emulsion the footing in reality never really sure constant flux through vision the fear that creates the flux the transportation of the fear which constitutes a large part of our mental makeup the loss of which results in over-heating uncomfortable sweating an emersion of the body into the water of the sliding emulsion to gain some footing, any even a false sense that footing may give escape move through the childhood memories the jewel cuts the water splits the fear opening up the life’s screen better/deeper vision an understanding acceptance of the fear washes the sweat and grime of that reality away calm heroine. – Carl Brown