Part of Winter 2012
Trinity Square Video and Pleasure Dome are pleased to present No Place, an installation by artist Jenn E. Norton. Using video and photography, Norton’s new body of work, is a playful reflection on real estate development and consumption through fantastical animated compositions. Through her depictions of fragile and unlikely structures, Norton explores the tenuous relationship we share with residence, ownership, and the idea of home.
The new and recent works featured in No Place depict onscreen worlds where intricate architectural forms and delicate organic elements coexist: plush moss on a forest floor forms a city square as luxurious condo towers appear in boreal fungi; a tightly framed image of the cracks in a rock reveals an interior of a bustling metropolis replete with cars, suspended gondolas, and stylized skyscrapers. Using motion graphics and 3D animation, Norton’s digital tableaus articulate an anxiety that traverses the meeting of natural worlds and our built, electronically mechanized reality. The irony of the work corresponds to these concerns: instead of building from the ‘ground up’, Norton’s neighbourhoods are perfectly integrated into an existing natural landscape, appearing inviting and desirable, yet obviously impossible. These miniature civilizations are propositional vignettes, not unlike the concept renderings of architectural firms; often impossible to achieve, but sought after nonetheless–a utopia.(TSV)
A playful indictment of realty consumerism through fantastical composites of delicate architecture integrated and in conflict with geological structures. Jenn E. Norton
Jenn E. Norton is a Guelph-based artist working with video, installation, sound, and kinetic sculpture. Norton has exhibited at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre (Guelph), Saw Video (Ottawa), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), and the Nova Scotia Art Gallery (Halifax). Her videos have been screened in numerous national and international festivals. Playing with the elastic qualities inherent of digital technologies, Norton engages themes of myth, agency, and the opulence of artifice within the construction of spectacle. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph (2007) and a BFA from OCAD University (2003).
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