Opening Reception: Thursday, March 7, 6-8pm
Artist talk: Saturday, March 9 at 2 PM
Nicholas Metivier Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new films by Jeffrey Blondes. The exhibition will open on March 7th and run until March 30th with an opening reception on Thursday, March 7th. The gallery will host a talk with Jeffrey Blondes on Saturday March 9th at 2 pm.
Jeffrey Blondes creates high definition, real-time films about the subtle yet mesmerizing changes in nature. His films range in length from 9 to 74 hours and are filmed over the course of several days, months, and sometimes an entire year. Although trained as a photographer, Blondes spent the first 20 years of his artistic career as a painter. While he is recognized as a pioneer in the landscape film genre, his work is more often aligned with painting than video. Since completing his first film in 2005, the scale and complexity of his work has evolved alongside new available technologies. While highly technical and mathematical in their concept and production, the success of Blondes’ films is their nuanced tranquility and deceptive simplicity.
Many of Blondes’ films are made in the Loire Valley, France where he currently lives and works. The close proximity of his home to the subject allows him to capture seasonal changes over the course of one year. Blondes has also travelled around the world to document some of the most fascinating natural phenomena including 24 hours of daylight during the Summer Solstice in the Arctic Circle; the dramatic tidal change in the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia and most recently, the unique landscape of iconic pink rocks and sparse vegetation in Georgian Bay, Ontario.
Cardinal Points presents four recent films from France, Scotland, Canada and the United States. For Loch Shiel - 24 Hour Film (2016) and Georgian Bay 1080° : 72 Hour Film (2018), Blondes mounted two back to back cameras on a custom motor moving at the speed of the earth’s rotation. Filmed over several days between sunrise and sunset, the resulting films present 360 degree pans that record drastic variations in topography and weather as well as occasional wildlife. While the slow horizontal pan is nearly imperceptible, within a five or ten-minute window, the scene has transformed significantly. Wyoming : 3x180° - 36 Hour Film (2015) presents the viewer with three 180 degree pans across a section of landscape. The camera also zooms in to explore a variety of colours and textures over the course of three seasons.
Blondes filmed Etang de Pezieres IV - 48 Hour Film (2018) in France over the course of one year using a technique that combines panning with new zoom lens technology. The camera zooms out over the course of the day from a macro view of a willow branch at sunrise to a long view of a pond at sunset. This same sequence is repeated for each of the four seasons.
Jeffrey Blondes was born in the United States in 1956 and has lived and worked in France for more than thirty years. Blondes’ work is widely collected internationally in both private and public collections. Exhibitions include the Centre d’Arts et de Nature, Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, France; Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France and Somerset House, England. He has completed several commissions including a unique work for the Arts Department of Stanford University, California in 2017 and, most recently, a four-channel video for the permanent collection of Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul.