Vincent Grenier

Boys love to spin until they collapse. Is the world then spinning out of control? Preparations for renegotiating the Nonproliferation Treaty.

“Washes of water and other liquids soak the imagery...strung together for a rather enigmatic yet definite statement on something. Only the subconscious knows for sure.” --G.K.

An hour-long saga of Mick Terrific, rock 'n' roll star, and the cast of 50 he encounters on his search for "Mr. Wonderful." “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. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

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.

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.

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.

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…

"Catch is a fragmented observation on hidden reflective surfaces, the corner of a dormant television screen, a window..." —Mike Reynolds

Material Incidents brings a layered look at the secrets of light's rituals and it’s loose associations with matter, temperature and the senses. Our eyes, our brain’s primary sensors, ultimate arbiters of our sense of reality, well being and even of security, are closely implicated in this shadowy drama where notions of solidity, joust with fluidity and the ephemeral.

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

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.

"'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

A humorous, digitally induced meditation on colors, motion and space from a few frames of road side fall panorama in upstate NY.

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.

The Upper West Side has some of the tallest brick apartment buildings in NYC. The orderly but deserted and aging concrete courtyards, their metal stairs and shafts, register a dramatically changing atmosphere. This is a cinema that seeks to observe, obscure, shorten and protract, and redefine, while remaining open ended.

"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

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.

"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 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.

"The insinuation of camera movements and the familiarity of the same forms recurring in black and then luminous white shapes, makes X an intriguing visual play on positive/negative space. Scale, depth and angle of view are indecipherable. Is it the object or the cameras which moves across the frame? This Rubic's cube for seeing simultaneously demonstrates the illusionism of cinematic space and the camera's ability to isolate and transform. Grenier's use of silence in X is perfectly à propos to its concerns. -Raphael Bendahan, Vanguard, Summer 1985. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

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.

Burning Bush is made from a series of mid fall shots of a bright "digital" red euonymus both in real time and with video time lapses. Much of the ideas for the piece emerged during post-production. The Euonymus mid fall "natural" leaves are startling, their colors are so saturated as to appear unreal, their purity so uniform as to appear manufactured. It has long been a fascination of mine to activate shared qualities living in parallel universes; always, that which is present in the make up of the digital cinema image and that of the physical world it is representing. Assumptions we make about the real world, the way it is recorded, or more appropriately translated, are cultural constructs. The inevitable biblical conotations of the Burning Bush refers to man made poetic as well as insttutional constructs. - VG

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.

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

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. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

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.

This video was originally shot in Hi 8 on a winter day in 1992, the last day Ithacans could have their dry garbage and cast-offs hauled away for free by the city of Ithaca. Huge piles of debris and broken household items had accumulated on curbsides throughout the city, awaiting disposal. Then it snowed. These piles, the broken kinks of the comfort machine of consumerism, offer voyeuristic opportunities for incongruous art happenings. The camera collaborates with an old Toyota car, which doubles as a dolly, to photograph these found art installations offered in front yards. These random, quotidian piles transform with monster-like auras and new-found permanence. The Toyota also supplies the musique concrete soundtrack.