video installation

Strange Things

Oh, Darlin'

oblivion runs

raft

salt house

starring: part 2

STRANGE THINGS

15:30 min
Andrea Cooper © 2006
Created at the Banff Centre for the Arts
Final Audio Mix: Miguel Fernandez

SYNOPSIS:
Mina is trying to find her boyfriend. He's missing, dead, or on tour. She thinks that the North West Passage is a port-hole and that he may have fallen into Asia. Mina becomes unhinged. As she becomes increasingly lonely, cold and mad, the white space surrounding her begins to melt. Strange Things is the tale of a lost woman on an imaginary voyage: obsession, desire and the end of the world wrapped around the imaginary 'other' of Canadian identity.

North as a place is no longer simply a nowhere land. No longer the wilderness, it still conceptually occupies a profound psychic space within Canadians' as poetic myth. "The quest-like journey north of characters in plays, poems, novels, and films usually leads to isolation, madness, violent death, to what Margaret Atwood, quoting Robert Service, calls Strange Things" (Canada and the Idea of North, Sherrill Grace, pg. 35). I wished to debunk and embody the persona of the north that famed Canadian author Robert Service created and Atwood questioned- a sort of crazy femme fatale that will seduce, and leave you for dead.