Exhibitions 2002-2003
Project Room

Dustclouds
Julie Andreyev
October 31 to December 7, 2002

Julie Andreyev, Sills from Dustclouds, 2002

Dustclouds presents two moving pictures that share a hypnotically rhythmic
compositional flow recalling gestural abstraction. On the left is a loop derived from news footage of the collapsing World Trade Center Towers. On the right is a loop taken from the 1998 Hollywood film The Siege (an action-thriller involving radical Islamic terrorist cells blowing up buildings in Manhattan). The fictional representation on the right inscribes the reportage on the left — it's like a movie. In turn, they are presented like a modernist painting diptych. This uncanny mirroring dramatizes an avoidance of the incomprehensible (such as death and the horrific) through identifications with simulacral references. As such, the piece distills the way in which many people were trying to make sense of events as they unfolded on September 11th, 2001. The trauma of the real, as it is perpetually repressed, becomes the meditative engine of Dustclouds.

- Jeremy Todd

Bio: Julie Andreyev

Julie Andreyev is currently Associate Professor of visual art at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. She completed her undergraduate work at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and received her MA from Simon Fraser University. Imagery from entertainment and news media such as television broadcasts and movies informs the conceptual and formal aspects of Andreyev's work. Her interests also include research into contemporary entertainment sites such as arcades, consumer VR systems, video games, and historical devices such as panoramas, stereoscopes, and dioramas. Her work, which has been exhibited across Canada and in Australia, consists of digitally produced prints, photographic installations and video.