John Greyson & Dave Wall

His Instructors Have Described Him As An Unmotivated Student

April 16-May 15, 2004

Paul Petro Contemporary Art and the Images Festival of Independent Film, Video and New Media are pleased to present a new video installation by Toronto-based artists John Greyson and Dave Wall.

Here is some background to His Instructors...: On August 14, 2003, twenty Pakistani students in Toronto were arrested under the auspices of Project Thread, the RCMP's anti-terrorist investigation. Detained as national security risks, the students were held for 2 1/2 months without charges, and finally deported back to Pakistan on unrelated visa issues. Though all security-related questions proved to be unfounded, the RCMP continued to stand behind their 4-page report which resulted in the arrests. It contained such evidence as: “His instructors have described him as an unmotivated student.” His Instructors... is a video chorale rendering of this sentence, sung by twenty voices that overlap in not-perfect-unison. Because they are singing it letter by letter, it is both musically abstract and drawn out with the melody being determined by an (incomplete) alphabet, drawn from the names of the men.

This alphabet will be arranged on the upstairs staircase, one name per stair, making an alphabetic keyboard. In turn, this keyboard will be mapped onto a G-clef score. A composite video projection on the floor includes a loop of this melancholic chorale with the adjacent walls covered in black ropes with T-shirts containing the back of the head of each student, each corresponding to their name/letter in an alphabetic keyboard.

John Greyson is a film/video artist and cultural activist whose features include: Urinal (1988 - Best Feature Teddy, Berlin Film Festival); Zero Patience (1993 - Best Canadian Film, Sudbury Film Festival); Lilies (1996 - Best Film Genie, Best Film at festivals in Montreal, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, San Francisco); Uncut (1997, Honourable Mention, Berlin Film Festival); The Law of Enclosures (2000, Best Actor Genie); Proteus (2003, co-created with Jack Lewis). Most recently he and composer Dave Wall exhibited the video chorale Fig Trees at Oakville Galleries earlier this year. He is the winner of the Toronto Arts Award for Film/Video, 2000.