As seen on TV
Toronto video artist changes the channel
BY Melissa Wilson
Photography by Molly Crealock
Some climb Mount Everest, some swim the English Channel and some venture to the moon. Tasman Richardson’s quest is to capture the sun. The Toronto-based video artist is working on a project that will blanket a room with artificial rays of sunlight and images of the sky. Tentatively titled The Sun Always Shines on TV, the installation will use live webcam images to create a patchwork mural of the heavens, with the sun moving in real time through different slices of video, constantly rising and setting around the room.
“There’s something interesting about the fact that the sun could be ever-present and that our consciousness is actually assisted by recordings and transmissions,” says Richardson. “It’s aesthetically pleasing, but at the same time, it’s disturbing.”
Ideas about the way television shapes us are recurring themes in Richardson’s work. The artist is best known for his video collages—strangeyet- familiar fragments from movies, video games and television that he layers and stitches together. “Those you spend time with decide your personality, and the same goes if you spend eight hours a day staring at a television screen,” he explains. “It’s no surprise people use sitcom catchphrases and become uncomfortable with pauses in conversation. There is no silence in television.”
The 34-year-old first tested the waters of video art while attending the Ontario College of Art & Design in the early 1990s, where he created Jawa, a style that draws inspiration from Dadaist cut-ups, William S. Burroughs and Star Wars. The technique employs a “machine-gun edit style” that creates a unique relationship between picture and sound. In Richardson’s work, clips often only 1/30th of a second bombard the viewer—everything from 1950s sitcom classics to Kill Bill. Obsessed with the idea that feelings of nationalism can be detrimental, Richardson uses popular images that are as universal as possible and kneads them into signposts that convey broader ideas and themes. In one of his pieces, Charlton Heston becomes a character, a symbol of all curmudgeonly right-wingers. The meaning is clear even if the audience is unaware of his gunwielding history.
Jawa was born out of Richardson’s critique of contemporary art. For him, the building blocks of storytelling are all in place— concepts, themes and images are simply repeated over and over again, refined and repackaged for new audiences and new generations. Instead of adding to the “ever-growing waste pile of unnecessary, redundant media,” Richardson relies on recycled remnants of discarded film. “The language of recordings is like a dictionary,” he explains. “It’s wasteful to reshoot an entire concept if all I’m working with is symbols.”
In 2002, Richardson co-founded the art collective Famefame with three other Toronto students. The Famefame manifesto was militant in tone, lobbying for the “promotion of the aggressive, intense and volatile,” and the core members took this philosophy to heart: all got tattoos of the logo on their right inner wrists to prove their devotion. Although the collective disbanded in 2007, Richardson feels the passion and seriousness behind the movement are vital for successful art. “I’m really in love with the idea that people could be so passionate that they could withstand cynicism, which is really hard to do,” says Richardson.
