Mean

“Mean” is a diptych made from Super 8 film and old video footage. The pun of the title comes from the extra levels of “meaning” we attach to nation, religion, sports teams, and even to art genres like film and video. The hockey players were shot in Super 8 off a TV set and then subjected to cheap and crude “toy-like” effects – the result seems to capture the tragicomic nature of hockey fights (and of artists arguing). With the fans, the favourite kind of hockey fight results in 100% domination, with the complete humiliation and psychological disintegration of the loser. “Mean” tries to dissolve and reconstitute this corrosive culture into a kind of uglybeauty. The diseased maple leaves were filmed beside Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway, the lens focusing on the sky and the sun between the branches. This piece isn’t really a film or video, it’s “grain + noise.”