SOS
dual-channel video installation to be projected // total duration one hour // sound
SOS is based on avant-garde cinema structuralist classic, Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper, consisting of re-created media which never repeats over the one hour duration of the piece. SOS hovers around the synthesis of architecture and technology inside an aesthetic replete with contradictory impulses. The visual component deploys a visceral excess in the name of minimalism; all in attempt to see structure dissolve into phantasm, or, negative form. The video perpetually morphs through various states of degradation, over time folding its own structure into a sort of void, arriving at the negative through these means.
One of the many ways Rimmer's work is reconstituted is through the insertion of the artists into the work. They re-perform the task of the female factory worker in Variations (which relies upon found material), continuously shaking out a piece of imitation cellophane in homage to this anonymous factory worker: capitalism's notion of the ideal endurance performer. However the apartment the source material for SOS was shot in attests to no hardship of labour whatsoever, further highlighting shifting economies and intergenerational ruptures surrounding the status and location of the 'avant-garde.'
SOS was exhibited at the Khyber Centre for the Arts in Halifax in April 2002
