Presented as part of Knot Projections 2019: Imagining Publics, a city-wide public art exhibition in Ottawa running from July-November 2019, featuring five new commissions by Ottawa artists at four outdoor locations. The exhibition was the culmination of a year-long commissioning program, which ran simultaneously with the Video in the Public Sphere speaker series – a discursive program featuring international artists and scholars who spoke Knot Project Space and at times ran workshops and seminars on themes related to public art. More info about the project can be found here.
The Future is Up
The Future is Up is a non-linear, randomized video loop from an imaginary perspective – a view of the moon from its outer orbit. Through continuous and subtle centrifugal movements, ‘space junk’ whizzes, collides, scatters and spins before the lens in a weightless, indeterminate choreography. Reflective aluminium cans, shiny metallic foil, coloured vinyl squares, melted industrial rock formations, and packing peanuts are some of the objects that populate Phipps’ outer spaces. Fifty years since the moon landing, The Future is Up recalls the aesthetic of 1960s sci-fi motion picture design in its compositional approach, while the objects that appear are drawn from materials from the era’s urban sprawl, or otherwise resemble pieces of its various spacecrafts. Lusciousness-producing visual effect strategies lifted from food commercials are used to render these materials somehow appetizing while drifting in their zero gravity trajectories. These visual grammars of advertising gesture towards the existence of a corporate entity operating in a futurity where waste has exceeded our sublunary limit, where the planetary has been privatized and the void is at our disposal.
Sasha Phipps
Sasha Phipps is an Ottawa-based French-Canadian artist working in video, installation, painting, and public art interventions. He received a college diploma in 3D animation at La Cité collégiale in spring 2006 and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa in the spring of 2010. He maintains an artistic practice in the City of Ottawa and works as the photography and media arts technician for the visual arts department at the University of Ottawa.