Kreider + O’Leary
Video Shakkei: Post-Performance Drawings
A series of drawings, as word-and-image composites, reflecting on the process and practice of site-specific performance and time-based drawing in Video Shakkei - a series of 14 performances or ‘live drawings’ enacted in locations throughout the Kansai region of Japan. There are five pieces in total, each produced directly on a wall panel of approximately 3m x 5m and interlinked in a vertically ascending space.
Drawing from the Japanese practice of shakkei, or ‘borrowed landscape,’ we visited a number of carefully selected sites in Japan – from ancient Shinto spaces of ritual in Ise to the hyper-futuristic Umeda Sky building in Osaka – to perform a sequence of actions or ‘live drawings’ in response to the spatial and material qualities of each location. The actions were recorded simultaneously from differing points of view using two hand-held and two miniature high definition video cameras. Edited together as a series of filmic composites modeled on the multi-scaled architectural drawing, the result is a series of hyper-digitized, absurdly choreographed and poetically rendered filmic images of place relating the landscape or architectural space to performed event, and this to narrative sequence.
