Vincent Grenier

In the playful and hypnotic miniature Moonrise, avant-garde luminary Vincent Grenier sets falling rain and its sweeping pock-filled shadows to an audio collage of DIY foley mimicking the persistent pitter-patter.

A product of the pandemic, Grenier's new film brings the outdoors in, with curious results.

A product of the pandemic, Grenier's new film brings the outdoors in, with curious results.

A product of the pandemic, Grenier's new film brings the outdoors in, with curious results.

Distinct fields on the same screen, foreground each other, invite comparisons, between different times and spaces, and the constructed and natural processes that inescapably defines us thru textures and emotional spaces. Commute does refer to regular travels between one place and an other, but also to substitutions, and exchanges.

A collage more than a diary using images as artifacts that reflect processes. Sounds often come from other rooms, altered by their distance and the spaces that they have come through, just as the images themselves reflect the history of their own alterations. It is also a humorous exploration of the ideas of vignetting as it frames, highlights, distances and alters space.

A collage more than a diary using images as artifacts that reflect processes. Sounds often come from other rooms, altered by their distance and the spaces that they have come through, just as the images themselves reflect the history of their own alterations. It is also a humorous exploration of the ideas of vignetting as it frames, highlights, distances and alters space.

A collage more than a diary using images as artifacts that reflect processes. Sounds often come from other rooms, altered by their distance and the spaces that they have come through, just as the images themselves reflect the history of their own alterations. It is also a humorous exploration of the ideas of vignetting as it frames, highlights, distances and alters space.

A collage more than a diary using images as artifacts that reflect processes. Sounds often come from other rooms, altered by their distance and the spaces that they have come through, just as the images themselves reflect the history of their own alterations. It is also a humorous exploration of the ideas of vignetting as it frames, highlights, distances and alters space.

On the corner of Brooktondale Rd and route 79 near Ithaca is an amazing planting of Forget-Me-Nots and Dandelions. An improbable dance between different layers of reality, one organic, the other mechanical, another the numbing everyday. Timeless fragility joust with fleeting enamels and the upstanding violence.

Water flows under two bridges, or so it may appear. Since the advent of the industrial age, there has been a heated dialogue regarding the relationship between earth's natural environment and manufactured human spaces. Watercolor (Fall Creek) exists between these necessary worlds, as time unfolds and remains difficult to comprehend.

The pulsating rhythms of fluorescent lighting not quite in synch with those of the video image, create a singular array of drifting yellows. Camera handler and son waiting for a pediatric doctor's appointment, while playful taunts mingle with the curious decor, the focused patients, slow blurs and daily life unfurl. Chance encounters, accidental time, in spite of everything, small miracles of cinema and being.

A four-part study of motion, shape and colour inspired by a robin's flight. Consists of: "Armoire Prologue" (2:40, 2007), "Coda" (2:30, 2009) and two new episodes (2011).

A rumination on cinematic time reversals as versatile continuums. Re-discovering the outdoors as (a stage) set where the natural is made to pose as the artifice.

This video was taken using small digital still camera on multiple bus trips between New York City and Upstate NY. The bus' many large windows, afforded dramatic reflections to this perched passenger feeling as if floating through the landscape. Lulled by the noises of the tires on the road, the incessant tremors, muffled conversations and trying to keep digital camera steady while being thrown from side to side, visual wedges kept uncannily intersecting and gesturing.

A black-and-white collage in motion. Shadowy projections and solids layered.

"Two weather worn red vinyl chairs on an outdoor promontory oriented toward a "view", stand as subjects and witnesses. The chairs themselves provide openings or internal views, into color fields, their standard issue "natural textures" upholstery, oval screens for the light projected through wind swept tree leaves." -VG

Changes of directions, in the wind, the edges, the shapes, a joyous and mesmerizing intrigue. Perhaps an other way to put it is to describe this piece as a humorous digital cine take on the long cultural history of the lessons left by the great Chinese painters of the 13th century for whom shapes and edges where often all one and the same.

"Revisiting footage he shot more than ten years ago in an American high school, Vincent Grenier combines deftly manipulated and layered images with oblique commentaries delivered by students and instructors. The socializing process of education is made visible in the architecture, surfaces and colours of the school, 'in the ambiguous quality of appearances so assiduously cultivated by institutions' (Grenier)." - Images Festival, 2005

A boy’s phantasmagoric world of heroes is captured in layers of light and hues. This video, humorously and poetically juggles ideas about make believe and representation of the everyday.

Miracle Grow is a personal piece with elements of a home movie. Originally shot in Mini DV, edited and transferred to film without leaving the digital realm, the film is an inventory of a growing baby as he struggles to gain mastery of his limbs. As the father the filmmaker attempts to insert himself within this well worn and taboo subject and redefine it. As in his other works, the images are composed and structured to lead us within other realms of thoughts.

A video portrait of my friend, Susan Weisser and of her rapport with 13 year old son Billy and seventeen year old daughter Amanda. The video, divided in two sections used as a premise the reconstruction of her daily rituals with first the son and then the daughter. Enactments, accounts, confidences and spirited arguments freely crisscross each other within the dynamic that my presence and that of the camera create. Great opportunities ensued for live tensions in the framing of sounds and visuals; a sort of enchanted construction from the fanciful revelations of the everyday.

I had been looking for someone's unnerving encounter, that conversation that one just couldn't get out of their head, the kind of event that leaves one still debating out loud while walking in the streets or doing one's tidies in the bathroom. After interviewing a few people, I found Lisa Black who obliged with one of her own and became the film's main character. A situation with many angles; the telling, the filming, the final projection event...YOU is an imaginary fictionalized you in a whimsical space. It is the still live residue of the broken relationship Lisa is here confronting. A parallel actor, the film is in the business of reinterpreting. As a result the film is closer to a psychic space, an ironic place where distance is also intimate and a measure of insight. Lisa Black is a member of theater 00bleck in Chicago.

Human subjects and their verbal discourse, dealing with fleeting and shifting identity.

Described as "a collection of 'windows' on a personal past" "Time's Wake (Once Removed)" incorporates material from an earlier version. On the earlier version: made from material I collected through the years when I went back to visit my parents at L'Ile d'Orleans, Quebec. It includes both home movie and other types of footage. In this film, the camera "I," in extension with home movie reality, is a living participating entity. The film represents an endearing but removed artifact, a strange contradiction between liveliness and frozenness. (VG)

Tall buildings and cars are shot through the Kinemacolor process, variable color filters and a water lens. Sturdiness jousts with fragility, past with present, alienation with tenderness, abrasiveness with sensuality, red with green. The camera is moving in the slick of space. Shapes vibrate selectively out of the image; others at different points in space and in turn, vibrate or flash as vibrations also vary in rhythms and intensity. The Kinemacolor process was use in 1915 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black and white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized, alternating red and green filters. This film, while already in color, takes advantage of many of the particularities of the system.

In D'APRES MEG, small hand gestures are microscopically observed in their everyday context, a garden conversation, a construction site, a gallery setting. By taking our common peripheral vision of events seriously, Grenier produces an evocative enigma. From these images and bits of conversations, which are equally mundane, a new kind of disinterested seeing can be engaged. One that does not reflect meaning as invite it through repetition

The precisions and idiosyncrasies of movement associated with domestic activities are closely stared at, or as it sometimes happens, watched carefully through the peripheral vision. This while rhyming, is done in alternance, thus creating sudden rushes in the mind while spaces collapse. Also, light burns wedges in this film, recalling…

Is it happening in the screening room or on the screen; in a snowstorm or inside; what isn't surrounding and what is? From filming Ann sewing, on a grey winter day.

Changes of spatial relationships, scales, locations, and materials are intimated with recognisable clues which nevertheless do not always eliminate the former understanding of the images. These and other levels of ambiguity are instilled, which shake the photographic image’s authority as a principle of reality by confronting it with its illusory nature. We are back with magic, made possible with black and white film, shadows and lights, the limitations of the screen and the depth of field. So as when film grains, dots in deep space, disintegrate the solidity and enclosureness of a wall, the intentions of the film and the transforming events accumulate at a very intimate level of the viewer, that is at the level of the mechanism of his understanding.

Project at 18 fps. This film is concerned with the projected, not just light or the emulsion or the illusion or the projector or the camera, but all of them. The surface of the film, the grain, is remembered when a similar but illusionistic surface appears (just as magnified), crossing the frame. Other times the grain is left to itself. There are the idiosyncratic focusing qualities of shadows acting as diaphragms inside the image. The elusive background confounds itself with the foreground. The notions of appearances and disappearances transform themselves in notions of time. Made with a grant from the Canada Council.

In “World in Focus,” the screen becomes the two-dimensional support of an amazingly versatile three-dimensional object (an atlas) which contains in turn two-dimensional pictures of other three-dimensional objects. The uniform use of a close-up lens creates often ambiguous or nearly unidentifiable images (from the atlas), emphasizing the rhythms, volumes, angles and movements obtained from the handling of the book.

"Light Shaft" diagonally crosses the screen with a wedged light formation, usually on the diagonal. Its variations are rendered through arrangements of the tripod while panning the camera. Limiting the viewer's attention to a smaller screen, a point in space, allows for a certain confusion as to whether the rest of the (dark) screen blends itself into the surrounding blackness or is just a window into it.

"'Shade' is a near exhaustion of the possibilities between camera (aperture, focus) and nature (sun, wind). It is a beautiful study-poem on the undying presence that renders the world perceptually. In this minimal area, the variations are pursued with quiet doggedness, each frame revealing the secret of the next." —Mike Reynolds

The film is a reaction to the obsession a seven-year-old girl has with her many Barbie Dolls. The world of Barbie is pushed to its innocuous and tragic conclusions. Ann Knutson plays the role of the mother. "Shut Up Barbie" was pixilated in Tiburon, Ca.

"'Window Wind Chimes' explores in semi-documentary manner the interrelationship between Vincent Grenier and his wife Ann Knutson in the environment of their San Francisco apartment. Conversations between them consist of fragments of arguments, apologies, affections and distillations of the personal rituals that take place between man and wife.

“PEED INTO THE WIND smears across the screen like one of those dirty underground comic books. It’s loaded with a lot of big scenes and unusual looking people that make this epic resemble a clogged toilet. Unfortunately, since several of the performers were not as loyal as Ainslie Pryor and John Thomas, the plot is difficult to follow but in no way hinders the sewer-like sequences. It’s quite enjoyable and possesses the releasing power of an enema.” –George Kuchar

Leaves change colors - but not in the way they do in nature.

The aviary in the mirror, in-flight hide-and-seek, mischief on the wing.