Kathleen Hearn, Drift, film stills, courtesy of the artist 2017.
Born Ontario, Canada (1971), lives and works in Toronto, Canada
Drift 2017
Two channel video, sound
Courtesy of the artist
Artist’s statement
Drift, a two channel video with sound, is a record of Sigurjon (a local youth from Skagastrond who drifts as a pastime), drifting around a light pole at the local wharf juxtaposed against the image of an Icelandic geyser blowing off steam. The performance is a moment of acting out against the territory, tattooing the ground with the skid of the tires, the sonic rev and squeal of the car breaks miming the hiss of geyser that continues even after the performance is over. At the end of the video, the circling stops but the marks remain and the geyser continues to hiss. The performance marks a complicated relation to place and life in a small coastal town, a place on the edge where the private and public are often in conflict. This imagery and act of circling also nod to Peter’s Wier’s 1974 film “The Cars That Ate Paris” where a driving-obsessed youth overtakes a town and Abramovic and Ulay’s 1977 performance Relation in Movement, a stamina piece where Ulay drove with Abramovic shouting out the number of completed laps until they ran out of gas. This work is from a residency project in Skagastrond, Iceland.
Skagastrond, with a population of just over 500, is a fishing village framed by a mountain and the coast on the north edge of Iceland. Class sizes at school average four, creating a circumstance of profound intimacy and also one that breeds the desire for autonomy. The youth I encountered spent their time in search of private places to define and perform themselves, often using the landscape as a space of privacy and intimacy. Those younger than driving age often find favourite “spots” to go to be alone and those of age to drive a car often gather for nightly “runtas” (a very slow-paced circling of the town (often 10k / hour) with close friends as a way of finding a place to gossip in private). Others, as a mode of rebellion, use their car for “drifting”, a driving technique of counter steering while making repeated circles at great speed, marking the town with their skid marks and sonic exploits. The work I made is, at once, portrait and landscape of the youth of Skagastrond, deriving from the traditions of portrait and landscape photography to record and document those that live there within their context.
