Philippe Leonard - PREVIEW by Stigmart Artpress

Philippe Leonard

PREVIEW REVISION

Butcher Rules

Philippe Leonard (Canada / USA) An artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s statement

Philippe Leonard lives and works between Montreal and New York, his artistic practice focuses on still and moving images, through film, photography, performance and installations.

'Gallery (Milan), Museo Nitsch (Naples), Struts Gallery (New Brunswick), the French Alliance of Washington, Croisements As a cinematographer, he is involved in artistic, documentary and commercial audiovisual projects, using a broad range of cameras and formats: Super 8, 16mm, 35mm, HD, etc.

His theoretical and aesthetic reflections focus on the complex temporality of still images, the spectral dimension of physical space, and sensory documentary practices. Distributed by Light Cone and CFMDC, his work has been showcased in notable international contexts, such as the Rotterdam International Film Festival (Netherlands), the Festival des

Philippe Leonard emphasizes a mastery of both analog and digital techniques to create moving images. He is a member of the Montreal collective of experimental cinema Double Negative.

of Bologna (Italy), WNDX (Winnipeg), the Experimental Film and Video Festival (Seoul), European Media Arts Festival (Germany), O 1

An interview with Philippe Leonard training could even stifle a young artist's creativity: what's your point about this?

Hello Philippe and welcome to Stigmart. I would start this interview with my usual introductory question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art? And moreover, what could be the features that mark the contemporariness of an artwork?

I think that too much theory can kill creativity and you need to be careful with that in the academic context. Especially at the MFA level where you need to justify every single move you make. It can be good to deepen your understanding upon your own work but it shouldn’t replace the act of making, at least in my own opinion.

I think this is a tricky question to answer because art is a notion defined from a cultural standpoint. For me, living in North America, it would be seen as something made by an artist with a specific intention, whether aesthetic, political or conceptual.

Between high school and University I spent couple years experiencing life and all sort of odd jobs. My filmmaking practice began during that period and I developed an approach outside of the school. When I got back to University and enroll in the Film Production BFA I knew what I wanted to do. I think that sometimes, the problem might arise from the lack of “real world” experience. The school provides context and limits within which you can evolve. It feels safe to be in that environment and I think it is necessary to step outside at some point to avoid academic suffocation. To get back to the first part of your question I would say that acquiring knowledge about art is really good to be aware of its historic background, what has been done

The artist is a position in society; a job as many others and the product of labor made by such a person is called art. But as I mentioned before, it’s cultural and even historical so the notion of contemporariness is trickier! Would you like to tell us something about your background? You hold a Bachelor's degree in Film Production that you received from the Concordia University and you're are currently studying for a Masters in Fine Arts, with a focus on film production: how have these experiences of formal training impacted on the way you produce your artworks? By the ButcherI Rules way, often ask to myself if a certain kind of

A still from Workers Leaving the Office 2013 | 35mm | b/w | silent | 2min

and avoid naive assumptions about it, but it can also make the act of creation more complicated, self awareness might arise as a barrier.

Commissioned project for Labour in a Single Shot workshop led by Harun Farocki at the MIT Media Lab. Using the Lumiere brothers' Workers Leaving the Factory as a premise, the selected filmmakers were invited to produce a short two minutes film using a single take to depict labour. I used a 35mm hand cranked camera, as an homage to the Cinematographe used by the Lumiere, to capture workers leaving their office in Boston's financial district.

Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your works? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?

I think of myself as a light hunter using black boxes to trap his prey. With optics and mechanical devices, I capture and shape light to keep a trace of experience.

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m working on, the process of capturing represents the longer part of the work because I can stand beside the camera for hours just for one frame. I could use an intervalometer to simplify the process but I prefer to control the exposure manually with a shutter release.

Whether I work without a camera in the darkroom using enlargers and optical printers or with hand-crafted devices, it always has to do with light, lens and some kind of photosensitive surface. Sometimes the ideas arise from making; sometimes they are imagined and planned ahead. In both cases it remains a tedious process and film can be very time consuming. For the series on time exposure that

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like breathing and it makes you more aware of the light impressions that are happening as you hold the shutter open. I am trying to demechanize the apparatus, bring it in a closer relation to the body in the same way the brush is for the painter or the pen for the writer.

2012 | DCP | b/w | 5.1 Surround | 6min

and avoid naive assumptions about it, but it can also make the act of creation more complicated, self awareness might arise as a barrier.

These images were captured during a long afternoon spent sitting in front of the Pantheon in Rome, paced by the sound of a shutter regularly opening and closing for long exposures whose duration was counted off in a whisper.

I think of myself as a light hunter using black boxes to trap his prey. With optics and mechanical devices, I capture and shape light to keep a trace of experience.

At precise intervals, the photosensitive surface recorded the constant flow of tourists, peoplewatchers, cars and animals as they moved, stopped, gathered, and took photos. The historic building thus reveals itself as a magnet whose pull on people has lasted for centuries. I Was Here is a reference to the common phrase often found scratched on public walls, marks left as visible proof of a person’s visit to a place.

Whether I work without a camera in the darkroom using enlargers and optical printers or with handcrafted devices, it always has to do with light, lens and some kind of photosensitive surface. Sometimes the ideas arise from making; sometimes they are imagined and planned ahead. In both cases it remains a tedious process and film can be very time consuming. For the series on time exposure that I’m working on, the process of capturing represents the longer part of the work because I can stand beside the came-

Like that age-old practice, travel photography is an attempt to record a person’s presence in a particular place – a photographed place taken home as proof. The soundtrack comes from the same place, but from a different timeline: it was compiled from the audio tracks of amateur videos posted to YouTube. These audio snippets, all recorded in front of the same landmark, tell a collective story through each “I” that has recorded a visit to that same piazza. The clips of murmuring crowds were then edited and manipulated to give them a particular synchronization with the images.

A still from State of Mind 2010 | 16mm | b/w | live sound | variable lenght

ra for hours just for one frame. I could use an intervalometer to simplify the process but I prefer to control the exposure manually with a shutter release. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like breathing and it makes you more aware of the light impressions that are happening as you hold the shutter open. I am trying to de-mechanize the apparatus, bring it in a closer relation to the body in the same way the brush is for the painter or the pen for the writer.

Electric impulses transforms stimuli into informations being processed by the brain. Using photo-sensitive electronic cells to transform light into sound, this film uses electrical energy as a vector to create an expanded cinema experience. The video shown here act as a preview only.

Now let's focus on your artworks: I would like to start with your interesting work I Was Here that we have selected for this issue and whose stills have been admired by our readers in the starting pages of this article: would you tell us something about the genesis of this project? What was your initial inspiration?

of about ten minutes was required for that specific image to appear. That is why the busy streets of Paris seem to be empty; the passers-by didn't stay long enough in the same position to cast their shadow on the plate. The only person that stayed in place for the whole duration of the exposure is that man getting his shoes polished on the street's corner.

My initial inspiration, although it was somewhat unconscious at the moment of creation is the famous photograph by Louis-Jacques-MandE Daguerre called Boulevard du Temple taken in 1838 from his studio looking at the street of Paris that bears the same name. What is Butcher Rules particular about this image is the figure that appears at the bottom left portion. It is the first human being to be inscribed and fixed on a photosensitive plate in the history of photography. This process called daguerreotype needed a lot of light to do so and thus an exposure time

To me this image as an incredible aura and opens a world of dreams and magic. A parallel between our perceived reality and the one created by the mechanical eye over time. It is dealing with the notion of optical unconscious, where the indexical nature of the apparatus can reveal things that are actually there but that we aren't aware of, in this case an accumulation of many slices of time in a single frame that isolate a figure in a ghostly post-apocalyptic tableau.

A still from I Was Here

in place long enough to cast their presence on the film while the shutter of my camera is opened. This is where it connects with Boulevard du Temple. Time reveals fixity while movement vanishes.

Boulevard du Temple became my reference in retrospective, when the work was actually completed and I researched this notion of time in primitive photography. The main trigger for I Was Here actually happened when I was living in Rome and reading On Photography by Susan Sontag. She talks about the nature of traveling photography and how people are fragmenting their environment in order to understand those places they don’t know.They frame, cut and remove little parts from a complex reality to simplify it. It also acts as a proof of having been there. Hence the title I Was Here, in reference to all these tourists, but also to my own presence, during five hours to observe them in front of that massive piece of architecture that has been there for centuries seeing all these fleeting human beings appea-ring and disappearing.

One of the visuals that have mostly impacted on me of this stimulating video is the skilful usage of the white which does not play the mere role of a background, and it suggests me a reference to Bill Viola... Would you like to tell us something about the development of this video and of your "video-palette" and -if any- the works that have influence you?

That’s very interesting because to me it is the least important aspect of the piece. It just happened to be an overexposed area of the frame due to the time exposures, I could have blackened it out with a red filter but I didn’t happened to have one with me at that moment.

I was at first hoping to get a result where you could see the immobile structure around which a cloud of souls would have been breathing to accentuate this idea of ghosts, people that have been there. What I ended up with is far more interesting than the original idea because you have a mix of both. Moving bodies are dematerialized by time while people holding the pose for their friend to take a picture are remaining

The work is a hybrid between 16mm film and digital post-production. I didn’t quite saw it as a video at first but more like a single channel film for the cinema. After experiencing it as an installation in a gallery space in Paris I understood that it was in fact best suited for that context. The piazza that

occupies the off-screen in the film is extending in the gallery space in front of the projection. Just like the tourists in the film, the visitors of the gallery are walking, stopping to look the monument and walking again. They might also cast shadows on the screen, unifying their presence with those tourists in Rome. That rhythm of people moving in public spaces and the fascination they have for monuments are the main inspiration for that piece. If I have been asked to choose an adjective that could sum up in a single word your art, I would say that your it's "kaleidoscopic": I can recognize an effective symbiosis between apparently contrasting forms, that establish a productive energy capable of giving autonomous life to the artwork itself... and at the same time it forces us to meditate about the inner struggle between opposite forces, that seek for an equilibrium... an human harmony that comes in response to environmental instability...

It probably has to do with the fact that I’m a Libra! I’ve always been interested in the dialogue between contrasts and how a middle point can be expressed at their intersection. This inner life, or even life in general is made of opposite and that’s why I think most of my work is black and white. I like this balance between light and shadow, the gradation of tonal values on a grey scale. Very high contrasted imagery is also something I enjoy. Expressing extreme ends of the spectrum entering in a dialogue to occupy the space of the frame. I think of it as the Yin-Yang, something organic and very alive.

MISSING CAPTIONS makes sense in a gallery. On the other end, you have this trend in museums where they put experimental films either on loopers or monitors thinking that they pertain to the art world and should be experienced amongst paintings and sculptures. On the experiential level it doesn’t make sense because most of those films have been made for the cinema. If you take them out of context they become something else. I think that in most cases, what you refer to, as a vague frontier is more something like video art using cinematographic production values to look better. I don’t see the frontier expanding too much on the other side, except few experi-mental programs in festivals that take account of the video art production as well. Or maybe the fact that artists like Steve McQueen is moving to the feature film world?

While crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you ever happened to realize that a synergy between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts? By the way, in these last years we have seen that the frontier between Video Art and Cinema is growing more and more vague. Do you think that this "frontier" will exist longer?

There is a place for cinema I think and it is clearly not in galleries. I get frustrated when I see a feature film being played in a gallery or museum setting with a little hard bench in front of it. It might be a way to exhibit a film as an object owned by a museum but it is certainly not the right context to experience it. I think that the main difference between video art and cinema is the attention span needed to experience the piece and the intention of the maker.

Your works have been awarded several times: it goes without saying that feedbacks and especially awards are capable of supporting an artist, I was just wondering if an award -or better, the expectation of an award- could even

A film like Omer Fast’s 5000 Feet is the Best that plays with a cyclical narration and can be entered at any point is a good example of cinema that

without asking to the artists that I happen to interview, since -even though it might sound the simpler one- I receive the most complex answers: what aspect of your work do you enjoy the most? What gives you the biggest satisfaction?

Considering my process, the answer to this question is very simple and it is the main reason why I still love to work with film after all these years. The latency of an image trapped in the celluloid, waiting for the chemical reaction to be revealed. This process of appearing, like the haunting of a form that casted his shadow in the matter. The afterlife of a moment in time, brought back to the present in the darkroom. That precise moment is magical to me, I am always fascinated to see these images appearing. Thank you for your time and for sharing with us your thoughts, Philippe. My last question deals with your future plans: anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?

I am working on this time exposure series that will be shown as an exhibition during the spring 2014 in Montreal. It will be articulated around the notion of public spaces and the monumental to pursue my explorations initiated with I Was Here. There will be a series of films (made for a gallery space), some photographs and probably a live expanded cinema performance to open the show. I will post more information on my website www.philippe-leonard.com in the next couple months. I am also developing a series of analogue filmmaking workshop that I want to bring in different parts of the world. I wish to democratize these practices by showing aspiring filmmakers how to do it and be independent from any kind of production structure.

influence the process of an artist... By the way, how much important is for you the feedback ofyour audience? Do you ever think to whom will enjoy your Art when you conceive your pieces?

If you receive an award or grant that is geared toward the production of a piece it might influence it by generating parameters or constraints like itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the case with commissions. But I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think one should ever make something having in mind the reaction of a potential public or even worse, which awards can be given to the work while making it. Showing to the public is always a great experience whether it is well received or not.

If there are people from collectives or organizations reading these lines that wish to host such workshops during the summer 2014 in Europe they can reach me in the bio section of the website by clicking the info button with my email address. Thanks to Stigmart for sharing my work in this publication!

I think that any filmmaker or artist wants to share that moment with the viewers, whether in a direct or indirect manner; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all about communication at the end of the day. I mean, when you put your work out there you want it to be encountered otherwise you would just keep it for yourself. In fact, feedback is important to make your thinking evolve.