Jeremy Shaw

Galeria Dels Àngels presents, in the SALA 2, two videos by Jeremy Shaw (North Vancouver, 1977), entitled Best Minds , 2007 and 7 minutes , 1995-2002, as part of the festival LOOP'07.

In Best Minds , Shaw posits the participants of Vancouver's Straight-Edge Hardcore scene with a distorted music. The young subjects, who live by the Straight-Edge manifesto "No Drugs, No Booze, No Promiscuous Sex", are attend a local gig and act out their own highly personalized and violent dance to the music, which is then reproduced in slow motion.

This brash and exuberant behaviour emanating from a group of people completely against artificial "thrills" serves as a harsh juxtaposition to the insistent music. The slowed down footage and painterly editing of the piece combined with the languid tune creates a hypnotic effect that toys with the conventions of video rock and appears to make sense of the frantic, aggressive dancing--at times seeming even as if it may have been choreographed.

7 minutes , in contrast, is a raw nostalgic moment captured in video 8 in 1995 (and revisited in 2002). It explores society's repulsion and attraction to violence as well as media's romance of reckless youth. This actual fistfight between two teenage girls, shot at a friend's house party when Shaw was 18, raises issues around the dynamics of group mentality as well as pre and post-reality television voyeurism.

By employing the filmic device of slow motion coupled with the addition of a soundtrack, this violent situation is dramatically re-contextualized from that of the "heat of the moment" in which it took place. The video is accompanied (and named for) Shaw's musical project Circlesquare; the lyrics of the song referring to the ever-present anxiety of living in an earthquake-prone city. The tension of waiting for the "big one" suggested in the song is conflated with the excitable tension inherent in these youthful protagonists. The teenage girls simultaneously repel us with their brutal fighting, yet might attract us, questionably, to their belligerent and naïve youthful abandon.

Some of the artist's most recent individual shows have included: Best Minds Part 1, Or Gallery, Vancouver (2007); DMT, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art , Toronto (2006) and Anti-Psych, Tracey Lawrence Gallery, Vancouver (2005). Jeremy Shaw is also a musician and has a significant discography.

Jeremy Shaw
"7 minutes" & "Best minds"
SALA 2