TOUCH 1.0
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/TOUCH-One-point-0.mov Touch 1.0, commenced in 2012, current version 8:02 minutes Touch 1.0 is an ongoing and additive compilation of low-res images of human hands making contact with animals, sourced from details of photos for sale on eBay.ca. New versions are produced for each public screening or private commission (Only public versions will appear here).
play byplay
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/Play_Byplay-r.mov play byplay, 2009/2013, 3:24 min looping video play byplay presents a binocular view, using footage from the artist’s Competence Archive, showing two European magpies passing a twig back and forth between them, until the twig falls to the ground. The footage is paired with an animation that isolates and traces the movement of the twig. play […]
NEWS from the In-Between
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/NEWS%20FROM%20THE%20IN-BETWEEN.mov News From the In-Between, 1981, 18:40 minutes Peacock’s conceptual video uses “radical displacement and endless car rides”—narrative, journal entries, weather reports, news broadcasts and repetition of text—to examine the fragility of personal memory. Typical sunny vacation photos are placed into a small pile of sand, followed by a chilly scene taken through a window, out […]
Ready Access
(Ain’t it a shame that all the world don’t got keys to their own ignitions)
presence
WHAT CAN BE SUSTAINED AND REPEATED WITHOUT EMPTYING OUT? I am with Garcia Lorca in many things, especially when he says he does not believe in creation but in discovery, doesn’t believe in the seated artist, but in the one who is walking the road. The imagination is a spiritual apparatus. Unable to invent the […]
(IN)SCRIPT
I have tried to make scripts and they seem to have little to do with me.[1] Video does seem to have to do with me in the way that writing, drawing and speaking do: their uninflected usefulness, like breath during sleep, walking, salt on the table.[2] Here I attempt a narrative reconstruction of my process,[3] […]
WHITEWASH
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/WHITEWASH.mov Whitewash, 1990, 14:15 minutes I thought of WHITEWASH as a landscape work where the environment was television. I found patterns of language and gesture that made up much of television’s content. What might be called “information” or “news” seemed mainly determined by the authority of a way of speaking, a relationship with the camera, the […]
This walk, these steps
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/This%20walk%20these%20steps.mp4 This Walk, These Steps, 1995, 05:00 min looping video In the video, the tightly framed faces of a male and female performer alternate in quick dissolves. Their eyes are blindfolded by a horizontal band of slowed video in which strangers pass each other in a public garden. The sightless performers perform the end of a relationship […]
Soaring with Dogs
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/Soaring-with-dogs_480p.mov Soaring with Dogs, perpetual remix since 2003, variable duration (this remix: 2013, 4:36 minutes) An eleven-minute clip of two dogs at play, captured on a road trip through Canada in 1998, serve as inspiration and source material for media compositions that are reworked and newly invented each time the work is shown. The ongoing […]
SIRENSONG
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/SIRENSONG.mov(excerpt from SIRENSONG, 1987, duration 8:30min) You are lured into seeing the place, except it’s no longer a place.It’s a scene, a point of interest. The landscape of Monument Valley, Arizona, recognizable from its frequent use as a backdrop in western movies, TV commercials, magazine ads and on postcards, is explored in the first person […]
Finder / therethere
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/Finder-1.mp4https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/there-there.mov At Gallery 44, Jan Peacock’s exhibition Finder considers the nature of scrutiny along with business-as-usual. We confront the nature of evidence compiled, its relationship to privacy and the issue of culpability when seeking meaning. Finder, the exhibition’s namesake, is a working of sequences from Peacock’s ongoing Competence Archive. Here we observe moments of private […]
Reader by the Window
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/Reader%20by%20the%20Window_compresed.mp4(Excerpt from Reader by the Window, 1993, duration 16:13min) A video/sound environment that draws on a personal archive of video walks through landscapes and cityscapes, recorded by the artist over a period of six years of travel in Tokyo, Paris, London, and parts of southern France, Ontario, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and the American southwest. Reader […]
Pie y Cafe
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/Pie_y_Cafe.mov (1984, duration 5:50min) With Pie y Cafe, Peacock takes possession of television advertising techniques, simple direct images, fast-clipped editing, voice-over commands, to expose the rhetorical method of American exploitation on Central America. Apple pie and coffee are emblem and symbol for economic and political imperialism. (vtape.org, Christina Ritchie) Artists Call Against US Intervention in […]
One same, same thing / Current Details
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/currentdetails.mov Current Details, 2003, 4:48 minutes https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/One-same-same-thing.mov Excerpt from One same, same thing, 2003, 7:20min The video One same, same thing documents a performance carried out in a solitary location. The performed action suggests a real event that is not easily described. It is hard for viewers to perform as witnesses, even with the evidence of the recorded […]
Wallace + Theresa
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/NEW_Wallace%2BTheresa.mp4 (1987, duration 8:35min) The reader by the window has finished his book and tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds…Imagine for him the speech he cannot speak.– Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) She says to herself if she were able to write she could continue to live. Says to herself if she […]
Midnight Reader
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/Midnight-Reader.movMidnight Reader (excerpt from Artists Proof), edition of 5 video nightlights, 2004. Maquette of Midnight Reader, installed The artist makes a continuous drawing with the fingertips of one hand, tracing a haptic line at eye level along the interior surfaces of the home, illuminated by flashlight and recorded on handheld video. When installed, the video […]
Bystander
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/Bystander.mov Bystander, a three-part animation for the storefront vitrine of Curry’s Jewelers, in the multi-site exhibition Here Now or Nowhere, curated by Micah Lexier for Prairie Art Gallery, Grande Prairie, 2009. On the first screen, printed fragments of a love poem are rolled into balls. On the second screen, the paper balls are arranged as a […]
Every day, the first words
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/Every_day_the_first-words_1.mp4 Installation images are from the premiere exhibition of Every day, the first words at the Owens Art Gallery, curated by Linda Dornan, 2005 THE FIRST WORDS FOLLOW EACH OTHER AND THEN EVERY DAY THE FIRST WORDS OPEN EVERYTHING ELSE In Every day, the first words, we look out over a landscape that is seen from the […]
California Freeze Out
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/California%20Freeze-Out.mov (1980, duration 15:46min)
The Road Rises to Meet You
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/BlissDread-the-Road-Rises-to-Mee-You.mov(Bliss) (Dread)Video for The Road Rises to Meet You (1986)Colour, stereo, 3:10 minutes each Coming up to a rise in the road, you think, “This is familiar. I know where I am now. I know what’s on the other side of that hill.” And you imagine it clearly. (It is just as you imagined.) (It […]
Account 1.1 / Account 2.1
https://janpeacock.net/wp-content/uploads/ACCOUNT2POINTONE.mov Account 1.1 / Account 2.1 will explore images of the technologized forensic search in contemporary culture, and ideas of accountability in relation to confidence, confidentiality and work. Using an endoscope with a two-metre-long, fibre-optic lens, I will search twice, in detail, the premises of an office workplace – once while it is occupied and […]
biography
Jan Peacock is a media artist and writer and Professor Emerita of Expanded Media Intermedia at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where she also directed the Master of Fine Arts Program for many years. CV Bibliography