Resident from July 1-31.2006

Pierre St-Jacques



http://www.bee-productions.com

Statement

Throughout my work there is a consistent concern for the ways that perception constructs one's world.This consideration generates work that explores, on the one hand, the physical structures that we create to organize our world, and on the other hand, the psychological structures that we imagine in order understand and navigate our reality.
More recently the narrative strand that some pieces have been following have led me to continue this exploration of structures as it pertains to the self.

About the project.

"Liars" is a short video piece not how one lies to others but rather how one lies to oneself. How one can construct structures and illusions in order to create a persona or a protective barrier against others.

In the video a group of three people are cloistered in a small cabin in the middle of the woods.They are hungry, very hungry. They have nothing to eat and have almost lost the will to venture outside to find food. They shuffle around the cabin telling each other the odd anecdote while trying to keep morale.
At one point one of them summons up the strenght to leave to cabin.
Outside, during the evening, he has a bit of a surreal voyage. He
ultimately returns to the cabin with an abnormally large piece of meat.
The others rejoice. They are saved. When he claims that the meat is chicken, doubt ensues and the group dynamics disolve.


Bio

Pierre studied Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design where his initial ideas about perception and the structure of narrative were planted. He has shown his work at Artist's Space in New York, at Gallerie Joella in Finland, and more recently at Real Artways in Connecticut and the Bronx Museum of Art in New York.

He is currently in production stages on a short entitled "Liars" that will be shot this summer during his residency in Turku, Finland.





Liars

with
Fredrik - Alistair Logan
Matias - Dean Portnoj
Ella - Maria Ruostepuro

Dialogue Translation: Tuike Alitalo

In the past my work has dealt with themes of the construction of reality, of how what we know creates the structure for what we think is real.
Because we all have a different degree of knowledge and a different experience we all perceive the same events and situations differently.

With this in mind the concept of lies became interesting. From one vantage point a real or true situation becomes untrue from another. This relative positioning could be applied to character's in a narrative. This became the basis for the film.

The film uses lies in a variety of ways, from outright obvious lies, to uttering assumptions that end up not being true. The characters lie for a variety of reasons, to protect their friends, to gain an advantage over the others, or just to survive.

The most interesting lies to me is not when the characters lie to each other but when they lie to themselves. It is a more subtle and devious form of lying. If in order to tell a lie a person must know the truth of the situation [otherwise it is just an inacurate fact, a mistake] then when one lies to oneself the tapestry within must in a certain sence block off certain perceptions and memories, or build rather intricate structures in order to justify the desired result.

I do not inted this film to be a study of lies, but rather a walk in the landscape of human nature where lies play their part.