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Comédie

Nelson Henricks

1994 00:07:00 CanadaEnglishB&WStereo

Description

"This video in two parts is a newcomer's portrait of Montréal, and focuses on two of my architectural obsessions: the Hydro Québec building and the Métro. I spent my first winter in Montréal in a cold, dark, first-floor apartment. I sat in the kitchen beside the electric heater, drinking coffee and watching the disk on the electric meter spin faster and faster, all the while wondering how I would manage to pay the bills. At night, I lay in bed and looked at the enormous illuminated 'Q' on the Hydro Québec building and wondered how much it cost to keep it lit every night. A quote from a physics text brought this first section into focus. The second section is less autobiographically-based. In it, a man searches for the meaning of life in the tile patterns of Champ-de-Mars metro station. Though I did spend a great deal of time at that particular station asking some of the same questions he does; I took his search to an end much more absurd than anything I could hope to enact. The moral of these two tales is: 'Don't lose your sense of humour'. It's from this cliché that the piece derives its title."

—Nelson Henricks

This title is also available on Nelson Henricks Videoworks: Volume 1.

About Nelson Henricks

Nelson Henricks was born in Bow Island, Alberta and is a graduate of the Alberta College of Art (1986). He moved to Montréal in 1991, where he received a BFA from Concordia University (1994). Henricks lives and works in Montréal, where he has taught art history and video production at Concordia University, McGill University, UQAM and Université de Montréal.

A musician, writer, curator and artist, Henricks is best known for his videotapes and video installations, which have been exhibited worldwide. A focus on his video work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of the Video Viewpoints series in 2000. A mid-career retrospective of his work was presented at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery in Montréal in 2010. Henricks’ work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery. He is currently completing a PhD at Université du Québec à Montréal.

His writings have been published in Fuse, Public and Coil magazines, and in the anthologies So, To Speak (Editions Artexte, 1999) and Lux (YYZ Press, 2000). Henricks co-edited an anthology of artists' video scripts entitled By the Skin of Their Tongues (YYZ Press, 1997) with Steve Reinke. 

Henricks was the recipient of the Bell Canada Award in Video Art in 2002, the Board of Govenors’ Alumni Award of Excellence from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2005, and the Giverny Capital Prize in 2016. 

Nelson Henricks is the curator of the compilation American Psycho(drama): Sigmund Freud vs. Henry Ford (1999)