Hélène Lefebvre’s Open Water, exterior façade of the Les Suites Parking Garage, July 27th – August 10th

In 2017, through the vision of former Director Penny McCann, SAW Video received a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation to build its capacity to support artists in the Ottawa region seeking to explore large-scale video projection on outdoor, public surfaces as possible contexts for their practice. The grant and the programs that it eventually produced represented a significant addition to SAW Video’s history of supporting artists in the region and nurturing experimental modes of moving image production and presentation. The grant also involved a major technological boost to the Centre’s programming potential with the acquisition of a Christie Roadster 14,000 lumens projector, bright enough to illuminate any outdoor surface and complete with ambient light in urban locales.

Through its capacity-building ethos, the grant also supported a series of lectures and workshops with experts in the field of public art, projection mapping, and related topics, which would become the Video in the Public Sphere (VIPS) speaker series. These visiting presenters would engage with a core group of five commissioned artists, selected from an open call, who were given the resources and time to each produce a new public video projection for display in Summer / Fall 2019 as an extended, sequential exhibition. In addition to this, through these funds SAW Video hired its first “resident critic,” Professor Malini Guha from Carleton University’s Film Studies department, who worked directly with the core artists in the development of their projects throughout, and with myself in mapping the overall trajectory of the year-long project.

In conceptualizing the program, Professor Guha and I thought through the notion of “capacity-building,” how we might understand this functioning for the group, and what this could mean beyond developing the artists’ technical skills. We began to shape a program that would seek to collectively build knowledge around the complexities and contradictions of art in public space, and then consider how these might affect the formulations of a public moving image practice. Of specific interest was thinking about how a video projection that occurs in public space encounters a transitional, uncommitted viewer, and that the potential address of that viewer would call for a behavior of the image that would be quite different from an image that occurs in a cinematic or installation environment, where immersion, sound, and force are at the artist’s disposal.


Ryan Conrad’s Don’t Believe the Hype!, visible from the intersection of James St. and Bank St., August 16th – August 25th

These and other considerations were pursued in earnest through the year-long speaker series, Video in the Public Sphere, which featured five invited guests who spoke to, critiqued, and expanded on various themes: the possibility of publicness in our contemporary moment, the opportunities and challenges of addressing a peripatetic viewer, the relationship of cinema to built-environments and architecture, the claims of site-specificity, and a public artwork’s right to refusal. Our esteemed guests in the program included artist and designer Patricia Reed (Berlin), artist and educator Dave Colangelo (Toronto), curator and scholar Monika Kin Gagnon (Montreal), artist and writer Amanda Beech (Los Angeles), and curator and scholar Dylan Robinson (Kingston).

With these visitors, critical exchanges took place in lively question-and-answer periods following public talks, as well as in a series of related, closed seminars. In these engaging seminars, members of the audience who had attended the lecture events and were keen to dig deeper into the material at hand often joined the core group of commissioned artists. Community participation in these seminar groups greatly expanded toward the end of the series, and through this a common critical vocabulary emerged, one that was accumulatively carried over and developed from one seminar to the next by returning discussion participants. As a supplement to the seminars, a series of reading lists of related texts called Shared Vocabularies was also offered by each of the visiting presenters and distributed at our events as printed material. These group practices of shared reading, thinking and discussion ultimately fed into and influenced the approaches being pursued by each of the commissioned artists, and over the course of the year, each of them developed much more informed and considered projects than were presented in their original proposals—one of the major successes of the program.


Pansee Atta’s we only liberate ourselves by binding our liberations to those of one another,
visible in the vicinity of Mill St. Brew Pub, September 27th – October 5th

Of note, as we progressed through the program, a clear limitation to its design emerged. Despite the group-propelled effects that were unfolding in the seminars, the structure of the program was such that it had already formed its predetermined outcome. The obligations of our grant stipulated that each artist was to produce one video work each for public projection. This meant that an atomization of the group’s final output was inevitable, restricting the potential for a collective artistic pursuit to occur through the group’s shared initiatives and emergent, mutual curiosities. In other words, these sites of public exchange shaping the program could only extend so far, and would later retreat back into the private processes of executing the individual commissions.

In an effort to push against this structural limitation, there was a minor but considered detour into initiating collaborative production that occurred midway through the commissioning program, the results of which were included in an exhibition at Critical Distance Centre for Curators in Toronto, which I curated in February 2019. Following a screening of Kevin Jerome Everson’s film Tonsler Park (2017) in December 2018 as part of Knot Project Space’s Common Cinema, Professor Guha ran a session with the group that centred on Erika Balsom’s 2017 e-flux text “The Reality-Based Community”—an essay that heavily references Everson’s film. Balsom’s claims were grappled with and examined by the group, and following this discussion, a prompt was distributed that would test these through an experimental, collaborative act of video making. The activity was specifically intended to utilize durational observation to look at the complexities of a public site, and ultimately challenge the standard positioning of public art as an “activation” of an otherwise dead zone or idle surface. Through executing protracted lens-based capture, collecting of field recordings, and eventually adding audio description and subtitles to these images, the group rendered palpable and observable a site’s inherent activity, in the process becoming attuned to the richness and layering of sensory experiences of place. The loose collections of images assembled by the artists in response to this prompt were later stitched together in a “collective editing” session, when the artists gathered at Knot Project Space to negotiate together the weight and rhythms of their images, and reasoned collectively towards the production of their single-channel video, Thicker Realities.


Maayke Schurer’s Tranquil Traffic, visible on the south-facing facade of University of Ottawa’s STEM Complex, November 10, 16 + 24

While this minor act of collaboration was not without issues and would certainly benefit from revision, and although the eventual video work that was produced by this group never manifested as a public art project as is typically understood, I propose here that this small-scale artist-led action was a key instance of becoming-public. Through the group’s commitment to developing a shared visual and auditory grammar, they encountered each other in a space of reasoning, debate, and consensus-building, where they formed a common method for working and thinking experimentally, and in effect pulled each other beyond their individual inquiries and modes of production to arrive at a middle-place. Through this practice of collective editing, the notion of publicness was understood not as a site that one visits outside of the gallery walls, but rather as a process of construction, as a material that is conjured, and as a relation that is established and held. This inverted manifestation of publicness shifts the focus away from the habitual considerations of public art’s abstract metrics of “impact” and “engagement” to instead turn attention toward understanding publicness as an active idea that calls us into a dissonant form of being, operating and thinking together. The shape of this form of publicness could thus be rendered not as dispersed, ambient address—where the passing glance at an image on a wall is the public artwork’s ultimate aim—but rather as a dense site of committed attentiveness—a gravity pulling and pressing against our own atomization, as artists, curators and centres, to reveal and imagine ourselves as the publics we seek.


Sasha Phipps’ The Future is Up, visible on the south-facing facade of University of Ottawa’s STEM Complex, November 9, 17 + 23

Despite the temporary collaborative detour described above, Knot Projections 2019: Imagining Publics culminated more-or-less as planned, with five individual video commissions occurring at four different sites throughout Ottawa, from August to November 2020. While I do not have space here to delve into each artwork in detail, the exceptional, generous and driven artists in our program, Hélène Lefebvre, Ryan Conrad, Pansee Atta, Maayke Schurer, and Sasha Phipps each presented deeply varied and thoughtful approaches to navigating outdoor public spaces and surfaces, where they capably grappled with and won viewers’ attention through the implementation of strategies for public address. Each work is written about and documented, at length and thoroughly, at www.knotsawvideo.com.