Anne Macmillan

Notes pt. 1 (2016) was produced during a four month Canada Council international residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France.

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Notes on the outside are placed inside shifting interior compartments. Footsteps challenge the concreteness a kind of order, the walls fold-out, subdivide and move. From above, the syntax is softer: OF’s lay near to NO’s and PILES’s above WAS’s.

Excerpt taken from work created at the Banff Centre, Alberta, during an awarded two month residency "The Emerging Atlantic Artist in Residence Program".

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Physella Johnsoni,
I am not sure how to know you, and I feel it presumptuous to think I could, or that it may even be desired. For whose benefit does this attentiveness emerge?
I will remember the state you have put me in. Twisted up and trying to sort out the various versions of myself that I find in the characters of your ecosystem- the water, the mountain, the malacologist, the tourist, the train.

As each chair is approached, it rotates in synchronization with the camera, always back-facing, resisting being circled around. Tension emerges between the appearance of dispossession (as the subject is refused by the object under investigation) and the manner in which this appearance was constructed. The chairs are highly controlled objects that only appear to have their own autonomy, as designed by the subject.

Four nine-foot square semi-transparent screens form a cube that is open at the corners. A body is stationed in the center of this structure, and synchronized animations are projected onto the screens.

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There is an array of invisible objects that surround and crowd a body; this body is anchored at the center of their assembly, only able to sense their presence indirectly, as shifting shadows.

A turkey, a flip-flop, a rake, a bolt, a milk crate, an almond, a paper airplane, a hair pin...

These things float into association with one another as they overlap and draw near, yet they are left divided as the body studies them individually. The exact nature of the relationship, between the body, and the heavy, empty air that contains these things is yet to be determined. Perhaps they move each other. At times they repel.

They are stuck and obscured. The things are held in orbit and in association with one another, their flat image morphing as they overlap. The body is rooted to the floor, half omitted, its recitation of a long list of categories reveals an inner accumulation of sorts, like the dense and entangled air that surrounds.

One night, I was walking with worms. My vision and movement became noticeable as I focused my attention on avoiding these living lines. My pace slowed until all movement was deliberate, understood. My left foot, my right leg, their positions as instances frozen in sequence. The process of one single step consumed my thoughts; I forgot my destination.

Walking With Worms is a looping video installation that visualizes the positions of worms along an undefined length of sidewalk. Over the five minute duration of the piece, the audio slowly recites the execution of a single step. This is contrasted with the urgent movement of the camera, which scans ahead compulsively with mechanical accuracy. The scale of the installation surrounds the viewer, which creates a sense a nearsightedness that mirrors the camera’s directed observation.

The viewer is left in a loop, retracing the same set of instructions. The work attempts to alleviate an obsession with uncertainty, by seizing a situation through careful analysis.

The interpretation of movement into line allows for an unfamiliar language to be revealed. The video becomes a small gesture to listen, to provide a surface for inscription, and a means to read what these subjects have to say, even if the translation is incomprehensible.

For the Trees integrates live-action video with 3D computer models of trees situated in an out of focus forest. The camera/subject orbits around each tree with a shallow depth of field in an attempt to get close to and see these objects individually.

At the moment that the subject approaches the tree close enough for the image to be brought into focus the digital image from the hand-held video footage is replaced for a digital image taken by a computer camera in 3D software of the same tree as scanned as a 3D object. The image of the tree becomes a hollowed out version of itself when the viewer draws near.

For my participation in the residency Field Work, I visited all of the the twenty lakes in the Halifax Regional Municipality that were given the same title of "Little Lake" by the government of Nova Scotia.

I swam the perimeter of each lake, recording my swim path with GPS. I used these data points to structure writing for a series of books (one for each lake) that recalls my experience and memory of the swim. Like a kind of road-map, the reader follows my swim path, page by page, with the zoom level controlling the amount of words on each page.

Rocks are collected and scanned in 3D. Their geometry is reduced and unfolded into a flat net. This pattern is then laser cut and scored. The "box" is hand folded and glued shut to enclose the original rock. Boxes are made to fit the individual rocks as accurately as possible. Gaps in the boxes are left as evidence of a limitation in the process of digitizing and unfolding the geometry. The nomenclature of each rock is comprised of the percentage of completion (how fully it was enclosed) the date of collection, and place it was collected from.

A straight line is drawn, a coin is flipped, a die is rolled, and the line is broken into two. For Coastline, these simple rules constrained the generative process of the drawing. Within these limits the complexity of the edge grew as the progress slowed exponentially.

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Exhibited in Somewhere Along the Line, curated by Ingrid Jenkner and Katie Belcher.

This work was acquired by MSVU Art Gallery for their permanent collection.

This work was also exhibited in 2016, at MSVU Art Gallery in the exhibition The Department of Prints and Drawings.