Part of Winter 1990
Ellie Epp is a Vancouver-based artist best known in Toronto for her three films Trapline, Currents and Notes in Origin. Epp, however, also works in other media, in particular writing, photography and performance. She will be bringing all of these together this evening in a real-time mix using film (sections from Notes in Origin), slides, sound and voice, prose and poetry. Epp’s pastiche presents fragments and artifacts in the form of images, thoughts and voices that build a composite of a landscape — the Peace River country of Northern Alberta. “From 1977 to 1981 with a first-stage film production grant I went to live in northern Alberta during the time I was up north I lived usually alone in a farmhouse among fields I was re-finding and recording a sense ot the place that I had known as a child as much as I dared and was able I made myself available to the spirits of the place (but what are they) there often seemed to be some firmly operant intentional connection between the place and my movements in it I would for instance have a sense of being called out with the camera at certain times of day the connection seems to me visible in the work, as in the slide made with a guessed exposure almost in the dark of two weeds in the presence of a third invoking a unified system where the gazer is pictured in the seen I’ve also thought the images look as tho a child cooperated in their making the tapes recording the difficulty of being a person in that place (ie among persons) are some of them excruciating others as when father and daughter talk about wild oats are very funny I wanted to know what is place, what is the feeling for place, what is the glamour of place, what is its relation to dream and image, what is its relation to childhood and to origin more generally and: how is this (felt, mythic) relation to place different from the way it is lived by the farm families, and why” – Ellie Epp
