Colour Bars + Tone, 2024

Colour Bars + Tone – a technical term to describe an analogue television calibration test pattern – also refers to a personal experience. On Gabriola Island, off the West Coast of Canada, I have a friend who can communicate with metaphysical entities. He’s a spiritual healer, an elder trained in shamanism. While walking the remote island, he related that there was a group of women – teachers and elders from another time, perhaps spirits? – that were connected to the land I inhabit. Apparently they had been watching me do my dancerly exercises in the forest and by the ocean. They asked him: was I moving weather? Straightening light into strata? Creating bands and spirals and bars of colour? I told him that I was just doing my exercise movements. Yet the sprit women were calling me Colour Weaver, or Colour Bars. It made me consider how to represent my shifting and spiralling inner landscape, perhaps with analogue colour charts and bars, or CMYK and RGB artifacts. But also that colour, text and tone can move within the physical body, exemplifying its connection to the soul.

“Our traces log our essence and leave a trail, a digital binary pathway of broken, degraded pixels behind us as we age and fragment and split. And yet, who’s to say that these small gathering of pixels, of digital noise, of colour bars and chromatic aberration are not the beginning of something new and fresh and green and tender in a parallel existence to our own?”

Performed text by Evann Siebens, Cloud Seven, Brussels, Belgium, May 2024.

Colour Bars + Tone seeks to reveal an analogy between the known, concrete and physically seen, as exemplified by photographic technology and terms, such as ‘chromatic aberration’ or ‘digital noise’ and an unknowable, internal, mystical world. Using photographic collage, video, live performance and written text, the artist’s body is held at the centre.

The project forms a lexicon, not only of analogue references – the colour bars taped on the studio wall are from my film school 16mm camera package – but also a library of physical gestures. Gathered through my personal history as a dancer and dance cinematographer, I photograph myself performing gestures from artists such as Joan Jonas, Marina Abramović, or Bruce Nauman. These photographic gestures are then eclipsed by cutting away the interior of the body, filling it with collaged colour bars, graphs, and other photographic artifacts. A series of hand-drawn collages ‘fill’ the body’s silhouette with the written performance script. This script is spoken not only in the two channel video, but also in the live performance, which turns a portable projector into a prop by projecting images onto the body. This refers to the technical knowledge we carry in our bodies, and alludes to the colours and tones we carry as our internal essence.

When I hold the camera, and focus the lens on another person, I feel like it’s an extension of my body, in a sensorial, kinaesthetic sense. Yet it’s different when I shoot myself. I started using the colour bars as a focus reference, a technical cue. But then the space in-between the lens and figure started to collapse, almost as though my body became transparent, and the camera lens was seeing through my body to the colour bars behind. The duality of being in two places at once – both in front and behind the camera – which speaks to the ‘double exposure’ of mysticism. Interlaced and interconnected, the photographic image is taken apart and rebuilt again in series of layered gestures between collage, photo, video, text and performance.

Music Credits: Daft Punk, Technologic; Glenn Gould playing J.S. Bach,’s Golderbger Variation, BWV 988; &Me, Black Coffee, The Rapture Pt II; Oscar Petersen performs ‘I could have danced all night’ written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.

Exhibition + performance image credits: Useful Art Services.