Art Metropole

13 Dec. 2019

Mark Soo: Twilight on the Edge of Town

Artist

Mark Soo

Time

7pm

Art Metropole’s offices and inventory space 163 Sterling Road, Unit 135. (enter ground-floor, door ‘D’)

Twilight on the Edge of Town is a conceptually-based video installation and website project by Mark Soo. The project is comprised of two related versions: the first is a project website that distributes the video as fragmented, decentralized, peer-to-peer torrent files. This version will be launched at Art Metropole in Toronto, December 13th, 2019, along with a video screening. In contrast, the second version comprises a large-scale, two-screen immersive video installation, which premieres at the Surrey Art Gallery, BC, in April 2020.

The project in part fathoms the question of how “distance” becomes a concept that brings the “near” and the “far”, and the documentary and the fictional, into a changing relationship with one another. References include points ranging from science-fiction to literary sources, structural film, and speculations on questions of place and collective memory. The project builds upon the artist’s ongoing exploration of perception and technology, and the relationship between reality and myth that underscore our understanding of history and contemporary culture, developed over the last fifteen years.

Art Metropole, Toronto

Launching Friday, December 13th, and available at http://twilight-on-the-edge-of-town.xyz/, the project with Art Metropole revolves around a website containing fragments of the video available for download through peer-to-peer torrent files. As a platform for the decentralized circulation and distribution of media, the format also forms a shifting community of users that, through their participation in sharing, point to the work and its contents as a product of continual fragmentation and collective reassembly. The web project will include regular launches of text and image contributions by various writers and contributors during the period between the launch in Toronto in December 2019 and the exhibition at the Surrey Art Gallery in April 2020.

Mark Soo, born 1977 in Singapore, works between Vancouver, BC, and Berlin, Germany. In his practice, he creates photographic and moving images within time-based installations. As part of a critical reflection on image-making, he is interested in how information technology and popular media put the human body into question and, in turn, create composite categories of representation and emotion.

Past exhibitions include presentations at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver; Vancouver Art Gallery; Western Bridge, Seattle; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and the Biennale für Aktuelle Fotografie, Heidelberg.

This is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.

Images

1: Mark Soo, Twilight on the Edge of Town. Mark Soo.
2: Mark Soo, Twilight on the Edge of Town.

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