PAUL LANDON, Canada
media artist
www.paullandon.com
currently lives and works in Montréal, where he is a professor of Media Arts at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques of UQAM, and sporadically in Helsinki, where he recently completed a Doctorate in Fine Arts at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. In his practice and research, he focuses on notions of wandering, architecture and urban transformation. He works with video, sound, photography, drawing and the relationships these media have with architecture and spatio-temporal perception.
He has been exploring urban space as a visual and media artist and as an artistic researcher for many years and is interested in the contemporary and the historic urban fabric. His explorations manifest themselves as reflections on recurrent features in the experience of the city: reflections on the spaces between the houses, businesses and places of recreation, the gaps: the sites of construction, demolition and dereliction that perforate the urban fabric; reflections on the built landscape registered as a diagram, a map; the grid renders the city abstract yet measurable, quantifiable and submissive. These reflections have led to different bodies of work, in various stages of completion, bodies that include elements of drawing, photography, video, writing and combinations of these.
CREDITS AND REFERENCES
1. Photo credit: Paul Landon
1. Avery F. Gordon (2008) Ghostly Matters, Haunting and the Social Imagination. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press
2. Walter Benjamin (1989) Naples. in: Walter Benjamin. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken Books
3. Anthony Vidler (2011) The Scenes of the Street: Transformations in Ideal and Reality, 1750 – 1871. in: Anthony Vidler. The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays. New York: The Monacelli Press
4. Frederic Jameson (1999) Marx’s Purloined Letter. in: Michael Sprinkler (ed.) hostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. London & New York: Verso