Kevin Schmidt's DIY camera reaches new heights

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      Kevin Schmidt
      At the Contemporary Art Gallery until June 1

      Kevin Schmidt’s art is as much about process as it is about product. Knowing this goes some way toward explaining why there’s a flare of light in the upper left corner of his aerial photograph of the Earth, shot at 31,000 feet and projected wall-size at the Contemporary Art Gallery. Schmidt’s homemade camera—on display in the CAG lobby and made out of foamcore, metal strips, and thick black tape, fitted with a 90mm Linhof lens and a four-by-five-inch film holder—leaked light when he sent it into the stratosphere attached to a weather balloon. The projector for this work, High Altitude Balloon Harmless Amateur Radio Equipment (H.A.B.H.A.R.E.), is also a DIY job, although in the dark gallery, it’s hard to make out its components. The emphasis on process, with its attendant performative and durational elements, also explains why Schmidt spent four wintry months in an isolated cabin in the British Columbia Interior. There, he assembled a wholly incongruous light display and composed the electronic dance music for his video EDM House, also on view at the CAG.

      Still, process is not the entire story here. Based in Vancouver and Berlin, Schmidt often riffs on aspects of popular culture and the ways we construct an idea of nature, while he simultaneously addresses environmental and social issues. He displaces his alternately subtle and spectacular works into distant landscape settings, calling up and undermining cultural ideas about wilderness and the Romantic sublime. In the past, he has erected a wooden sign, hand-routed with a quote from the Book of Revelation, on sea ice in the Arctic; plugged his guitar into a generator and played Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” on a deserted stretch of Long Beach, on the west coast of Vancouver Island; and filmed a screening of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on a boat descending the Fraser River. His ingenious ideas are well met by his technical inventiveness and material resourcefulness.

      In the CAG exhibition, EDM House is introduced to us by antiquarian means, reemphasizing the paradoxical nature of staging an urban nightclub and suburban Christmas spectacle in an isolated and historic rural setting. Before seeing the video projection, we encounter a realistic watercolour rendering of the cabin in a snowy field surrounded by darkly forested mountains. We also see instructions on how to program a dubstep beat, handwritten on paper in Gothic script (with errors and smudges, and using inkjet printer ink).

      The high-definition video, nearly 17 minutes long, reveals the cabin, built by Norwegian homesteaders in 1905, adorned with strings of coloured Christmas lights, which blink on and off in complex synchronization with Schmidt’s electronic score. The cabin’s interior lights also shift colour with the pounding, chiming, swishing, and ah-ah-ah-ing soundtrack, while the rolling and panning of the camera mimics horror-movie techniques, enhancing our sense of weird dislocation.

      All the elements of this work speak to not only the commercialization of Christmas but also another kind of displacement. It’s that of an old economy made redundant by contemporary market factors: family farms out, ski resorts, resource extraction, and other big-money projects in. Still, as the exhibition brochure asserts, EDM House also demonstrates ways in which social media and DIY culture challenge corporate hegemony.

      Similar social-media and DIY elements inform H.A.B.H.A.R.E., which Schmidt worked on with a group of amateur radio operators in Edmonton. (Records of their weather-balloon projects may be found on the Balloon Experiments With Amateur Radio website.) That flare in Schmidt’s image? Initially, it may look like an accident in an exploration of evolving photographic technologies, but ultimately it symbolizes independent self-expression. You don’t have to be part of a multibillion-dollar space program to take photographs high, high above our beautiful and beleaguered planet.

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