At the Charles H. Scott Gallery until March 11

The title of Jamie Hilder’s yearlong performance project, The Miracle Mile, is a reference that is both local and international. At the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, two athletes ran a mile in under four minutes—for the first time in history. One of them, British athlete Roger Bannister, had earlier that year stunned the world by becoming the first person to break the seemingly unassailable four-minute record. Half a century later, Hilder has distinguished himself by attempting the same physical feat—but from a condition of zero fitness.

The exhibition, which is a delight, comprises photographic, text, and video documentation of Hilder’s undertaking, together with a signed and notarized pledge “to make a sincere and devoted attempt to run a distance of one mile in under four minutes” over a period of one year, January 1 to December 31, 2006. In the same document, Hilder swears that he is not, was not, and will not continue to be an athlete. Digital photos attest to his antijock status: what we see initially is a skinny, flabby guy who looks every inch the geeky academic.

Artist, writer, and PhD candidate, Hilder transformed, by year’s end, into a lean, mean running machine. Sequential photographs, projected life-size in the gallery, demonstrate his increasing fitness and muscularity. A “training video” and diary (photos, texts, and graphs, wall-mounted in grids) suggest other aspects of his gruelling regimen, which resulted in much pain, copious vomiting, gasping ice baths, and a popped rib.

The infliction of pain is not the point here, but merely the side effect. Hilder seems to want to demonstrate that neither creativity nor athleticism is innate—that each takes immense dedication to realize.

The video, which montages scenes of Hilder running in locations around Vancouver, makes explicit reference to photo-based works by Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, and Rodney Graham, and the mood shifts from lyrical to revolting and back again.

The show climaxes with a video of Hilder’s December 31 attempt to run his own miracle mile, on a muddy track in Balaclava Park. Rather than reveal whether or not he achieves his goal, I’ll just caution viewers that the time given on the video does not necessarily match that of the actual event. Still, the project says much about the connections between ambition, obsession, pain, and deprivation, as well as highlighting the competition (for funding and social legitimacy) between art and sport. It also fulfills Hilder’s Fluxus-like mandate to both observe and rearrange the ways in which we organize our daily lives.

A nice footnote to Hilder’s project is that Roger Bannister was himself a brainiac. In 1954, the same year he ran the mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds, he also graduated from medical school. Go, geeks, go!