Compound Theory 2a
2014, Colour, Stereo Audio, 2:29 minutes, 1280×720 HD, Canada
A brief proposal of other-creaturely perceptions of time and space as translated through technology into the human sensorium.

Compound_Theory_2a_excerpt from
Terry Billings on Vimeo.

“Too often we move through nature in the isolation of a motor vehicle or along a constructed path through parkland or in the conventionalized and highly mannered outdoors of public space. Raising more questions than its scope can answer, Compound Theory 2a nonetheless challenges us to consider the perspectives of a different kind of body, of different modes of vision, and how variant means of moving though space and time might effect non-human consciousness, experience and perception. This work does anticipate a deepening engagement with the biological other from which we are so dangerously estranged.”
-Bruce Russell

Full text by Bruce Russell:
Bruce_Russell_Statement_CT_2a

Unvanishing
2013, 5:39 minute Colour Video Projection accompanies a live performance Jennifer Butler’s Seedlings
Screening: Surround Sound, Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra Contemporary Series, Paved Art and New Media, Saskatoon, SK (2013)

Inspired by the richly layered musical variations in Jennifer Butler’s composition Seedlings, a layered echo, reminiscent of Norman McLaren’s famous dance film Pas de deux, is applied to video of a Yellowlegs Sandpiper on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River. The resulting “Pas seul” implicates A. M. Lippit’s observation that modernity sustains the disappearance of animals as a constant state of perpetual vanishing, and more specifically in the cinema as spectral.

 

Unvanishing excerpt from Terry Billings on Vimeo.

 

Artists at Work
2011, Digital Video, Colour, Stereo, 11:35 Minutes
Exhibition: Momentum, Chapel Gallery, North Battleford, SK (2011)

artists at work excerpt from Terry Billings on Vimeo.

Chaos and Murder 
2010, Digital Video, Black and White, No Audio, 5:11 Minute loop

The video was produced by feeding a video of a crow flying through a Max/Jitter patch. The patch repeats the video and its negative image in numerous iterations which create chaotic patterns and an electronically produced group (murder) of crows. This creation of an electronic murder is a gesture in response to previous mass crow culling and die-offs due to West Nile Virus in various locales in North America.

Exhibition: Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon (2010)

Elm Elegy
2007, Digital Video, Colour, Stereo, 6:20 Minute Loop

Elm Elegy is a look through a window-like matrix into the life and death of neighbourhood trees.  Shifting values, including those of real estate, are suggested in the montage of images within the panes. Slowed and lowered bird songs create a plaintive soundscape.

Exhibitions: MPB Curates 2007, Calgary, Drumheller, Edmonton, AB (2007)
Psycho Organisms, WKP Kennedy Art Gallery, North Bay, ON (2009)
Flash, Chapel Gallery, North Battleford, SK (2011)

Reader
2007, Digital Video, Black and White, No Audio, 6:52 Minute looped projection

“Both Lewis and Billings strive for this same secret and psychological re-connection to a forgotten nature. These works are, on one level, about natural forms and organic growths invading and repossessing the gallery space and our psychological spaces. Just as the root ball grows and branches invade the quiet reader in Reader, the monumental presence of the tree is encouraged here to take back its place, and its importance, in human existence. The installation seems to be protesting the erasure of memory, by re-introducing trees and wasp’s nests into “corporate” or institutional spaces. It follows then that this erasure of memory reinforces our separation from the landscape. These works may trigger a philosophical rupture in the viewer and seek to influence a subtle shift of value systems that creates a space of resistance in the natural world to the corporate and contingent.”

Dermot Wilson “Installing Reflection” for the exhibition Psycho Organisms at the WKP Kennedy Art Gallery, North Bay, ON, 2009

Love Stories for Hermits
2005, Digital Video, Colour, Stereo, 14:15

LSFH Excerpt from Terry Billings on Vimeo.

In three humorous stories, the precarious terrains of memory become staging grounds for intimate negotiations and trials. Within these relationships, the natural world is both setting and player.

Exhibitions: Open Call XV: Devotion, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, AB (2007)
MPB Curates 2007, Calgary, Drumheller, Edmonton, AB (2007)